Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

A few years ago I had to go to the RMV to get my driver’s license renewed. This involved, aside from the paperwork and general atmosphere of human degradation, a quick eye exam. In Boston this is done by peering into what looks like a table-mounted View Master, only instead of slides of the Superfriends, this one has an eye chart.

“Read the letters above the green line, please.”

“X-O-Q-T,” I say. This is followed by a slightly too-long pause.

“And the rest of the line, sir?”

“Oh,” I say, quickly recognizing the problem. I need to turn on my right eye. I squint my left eye shut to give my right eye a jumpstart, and the rest of the line pops into existence. “R-P-V-M.”

Without another word she moves on to the rest of the paperwork. I didn’t get my license renewed that day, but that’s an entirely different story. The point of my telling you this is to let you know that like many people born with cerebral palsy, I have a lazy eye. Or rather, I had a lazy eye, surgically corrected when I was about two years old. As with language, where there’s a sensitive period during which the brain can soak up a native language with ease, there’s a similar period for the wiring of depth-sensitive neurons. This period occurs at a very early time in development, so my depth-sensitive neurons didn’t develop in an ideal manner.

I’ve spent most of my life with this crippling visual disability. Unable to play catch or aim a frisbee. Terrible at estimating how far away I am from anything. And most damningly, utterly unable to shake hands or open doors without accidentally punching someone in the mouth or mashing my fingers against the wall. My hands, they ache from being bitten and bludgeoned so.

Not!

This is why articles like “How 3D Works (And Why It’s Back!)“, by Erez Ben-Ari, never fail to tick me off. They inevitably equate depth perception with stereopsis (literally “solid sight”), a phenomenon experienced when the two slightly different images hitting your eyes merge to produce a sensation of depth (this process is also called binocular fusion¹). In reality, stereopsis is a minor contributor to depth perception, most useful within a range of five feet and essentially useless beyond twenty. The lion’s share of depth perception arises from monocular (one-eyed) cues. We tend to take these for granted since they seem so basic: the way solid objects overlap each other, the way things get smaller as they get farther away, changes in texture and other visible details, to say nothing of a little thing called motion, which always seems to get neglected in discussions of depth perception, academic or otherwise.

Mr. Ben-Ari’s article makes a mistake pretty early on when he claims that ”3D imagery has been around for ages, mostly as a gimmick, but things have changed in the past few years.”

Well, sort of. Stereoscopy, or the process of creating a sensation of depth from a pair of 2D images, has been around since 1840. Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the first stereoscope (among a few dozen other things). In fact, Wheatstone’s stereoscope is still used in vision research today, as the apparatus is both cheap and easily adjustable for each observer. You can make one yourself, either with mirrors and cardboard or, if you’re feeling particularly American, with iPods. Even setting the research applications of stereoscopy aside, Ben-Ari’s claim that it’s mostly a “gimmick” is debatable. Any doctor who’s ever gazed into a professional-grade microscope will tell you how useful that extra depth cue can be. Of course, research into stereopsis eventually led Béla Julesz to the random dot stereogram, which in turn gave us the Magic Eye. That’s not just a gimmick, that’s torture. There is no Easter Bunny.

Ben-Ari can also be faulted for failing to do some basic research into the history of 3D movies. Discussing the various methods of projecting 3D movies he says, “…the most popular way, initially, was to use the notorious red-blue glasses…A few years ago, a new delivery method came about, based on polarizer glasses.”

Ben-Ari gives the impression that this polarization technique is all newfangled, arriving on the scene “a few years ago.” I suppose that’s true, if by “a few years,” you mean seventy-four. Polarized 3D movies were patented and marketed by the brilliant Edwin H. Land in 1936. In fact, he started a little Mom and Pop business called Polaroid, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Most of the 3D films shown during the “golden era” of 3D in the 1950s were projected using the polarized method, with the more well-remembered red-blue lens system being used for comic books and later TV adaptations.

All this is window dressing that hides Ben-Ari’s real whopper. After a discussion of the basics of binocular depth perception and before his inaccurate recounting of the history of 3D film, he casually says, “For this reason, people with a damaged eye cannot judge distances correctly.”

Oh, I beg to differ. So would cinematographers, surveyors, and snipers (and anyone who spends a lot of timing estimating distances with one eye shut, really), as well as Bryan Berad, the one-eyed professional hockey player. While we’re on the subject of sports, I found at least three Major League pitchers who are blind in one eye: Thomas Sunkel, who pitched for the Cardinals, the wonderfully named Whammy Douglas, who pitched for the Pirates, and Abe Alvarez, who pitched a few games for the Boston Red Sox during—get ready for it—the 2004 season.  People with damaged eyes should be concerned more with their diminished field of view than anything else. Judging distances is not a problem.

Let it also be known that not all “damaged eyes” are equal. If you’re like me and you have some form of amblyopia then not all is lost. Evidence suggests that special visual exercises can restore an amblyope’s visual function to normal levels. At a large vision conference last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Sue Barry, who showed me that I can even restore my stereopsis, provided I’m looking at the right things. My recent experiences at 3D movies like Up and Coraline have shown me that I am indeed capable of perceiving stereoscopic effects, which suggests that with training I might be able to fully restore my 3D vision.²

So let’s review. Erez Ben-Ari wrote an article on the resurgence of 3D movies in which he botches the science, rewrites history, and fundamentally misunderstands why this resurgence is taking place. It’s not really about improved stereoscopic technology (although it’s certainly easier today than it was in 1936, when two reels of film had to be meticulously synchronized to prevent the audience from dying of eye strain). It’s more about 3D as an attraction. You still can’t get good 3D in your home, which means that the theater is the place to be. For this reason, I doubt we’ll ever see a usable home solution for full-color 3D. If the movie industry hasn’t already gummed up the works on that project, they really should. It’s where the money is. Just look at Avatar.

1. By the way, binocular fusion’s evil twin is binocular rivalry, which occurs when the two images hitting your eyes are too dissimilar to be merged together. Rather than fusing them into a depth percept, your brain has a big argument over which picture you should be seeing, with your dominant eye (yes, just like you have a dominant hand, you have a dominant eye) usually winning out by default. This is why red-blue 3D glasses almost never work for me, and it’s also why I had that problem at the RMV. ∧
2. It really seems to depend on how much form information my brain has to work with. I’m hopeless on a random dot stereogram, where a perception of depth arises purely from binocular fusion, but as the object is more clearly defined (more realistic) and/or takes up more of my visual field, it gets easier to induce stereopsis. ∧

At what point does cynicism become a convenient cover for cowardice? I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately (as well as the oddly poetic qualities of the phrase “convenient cover for cowardice,” but this is beside the point).

In case you weren’t aware, Proposition 8 is in court. Perry v. Schwarzenegger, as the case is officially known, is exactly what you think it is. The plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the ballot measure that modified California’s constitution to define marriage as an institution between one man and one woman, which denies gay couples the right to marry (a right they had briefly enjoyed thanks to an earlier decision by the California Supreme Court). If you want a thorough overview of the case, the New Yorker has you covered. The plaintiffs are being represented by David Boies and Ted Olson, a notable pairing because Olson and Boies were on opposing sides of Bush v. Gore. Olson, a conservative who represented Bush in that famous case, has written eloquently about why he believes that gays have the right to marry.

Also worth noting, Olson and Boies are not affiliated with America’s defacto gay rights lobby, the Human Rights Campaign. This case is going to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, and the HRC wants no part of it. In fact, the HRC has usually done everything in its power to avoid exactly this situation. See, the HRC’s lawyers have long believed that a majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court would vote to defeat any measure that tries to grant gays the right to marry. Fearing that such a decision would greatly damage the gay rights movement, the HRC has decided that it would be more prudent to wait until SCOTUS liberals up a bit.

So, you know, bear with us, we’ll get you gay marriage some time in the next ten to thirty years. However long it takes Scalia and/or Alito to die and be replaced by moderates. If you’d like to help the HRC you can donate money, pray for a spontaneous embolism in the brain of your least favorite Justice, use your last wish from that genie to create a paradigm shift in the makeup of the Senate, or genetically engineer gay unicorns that fart Social Security benefits.

If the above paragraph was a little too heavy on colorful imagery for you, let me clearly state that I am not happy with the HRC. The HRC is the Comfortable Rich Gay, as a friend of mine put it. The HRC has tons of money, a couple of ounces of political capital, and it likes it that way. The HRC is happy to shepherd along incremental advances in gay rights and clap like a seal when a mainstream politician pays it five minutes of attention. Boat rocking is out. When the opponents of gay marriage spout Biblical vitriol and outright lies to defeat gay rights initiatives, the HRC simply turns up its nose and sniffs indignantly. The HRC says that gay marriage is a fundamental right, but treats even the most minuscule advance in gay rights as a watershed moment in history, rather than the frustrating, insufficient advances they really are. This position is nonsensical.

In its advertisements, the HRC prefers to let straight celebrities from gay-ish TV shows and parents with theoretically gay children do the talking for them, rather than show actual living, breathing, loving gay people. Meanwhile, Yes on 8 showed the world how terribly, terribly confusing gay marriage would be for the Nation’s children, as well as the educational dystopia that threatens to ooze forth from that land without God, Massachusetts. Mind-explodingly stupid, yes, but it worked. You know what else is mind-explodingly stupid? The HRC’s failure to release an unambiguous statement of support from Barack Obama. I know his popularity has taken a hit lately, but back in ‘08 he was unstoppable. Probably wouldn’t have hurt to mention his name a few times.

Simply put, the HRC are a bunch of cowards, tiptoeing around anything even remotely controversial, terrified of entering into any battle that isn’t already a sure thing. Is this how the fight for civil rights works? Wait around until everybody feels comfortable treating you like a real person? Only fight when your victory is a foregone conclusion? Run around Washington in your neatly pressed business suit begging for a tip of the hat?

No. Gay marriage is a right. Anyone who believes otherwise is a bigot, pure and simple. I have said this before and I will say it again. There is no rational argument for the denial of gay rights, as Olson lays out in the aforelinked Newsweek article. He is currently making this same argument in a court of law, and if these pathetic depositions on behalf of the pro-Prop 8 side are any indication, Olson and Boies have a strong shot at making gay marriage a reality for the entire United States. I am optimistic.

Even if this case doesn’t turn out the way they would like, isn’t it worth trying? Don’t conservatives pull this kind of stunt all the time? A Constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman? No one thought it would pass, and it didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. It got people talking. The marriage amendment has become a litmus test for a politician’s conservative bona fides. Most importantly, it set the terms of the debate; instead of talking in terms of gay rights, the argument was suddenly framed in terms of protecting straight marriage. Note to Democrats: make some noise, already. Throw some insane, doomed legislation into the pot and stir things up. Get people talking on your terms.

But I digress. I once again return to my original question. At what point does cynicism become nothing but a euphemism for cowardice? When does pragmatism give way to paralysis? When does caution become fear? I don’t think the HRC knows the difference anymore. I’m rooting for Olson and Boies.

If this week’s iPad debut has taught me anything, it’s that the Nook sucks.

No, really. The Nook sucks.

The Tall One received a Nook as a Christmas present this year, and it was delivered to him before the end of January, because he is lucky. The excitement was palpable, but within two hours it had given way to frustration and disappointment. The Tall One had read that the Nook can display any PDF you load onto it. As an avowed Warhammer addict with several dozen codices in his possession, the space-saving potential of such a device was almost intoxicating to him. Alas, the Nook always displays a full page at a time, with no options for zooming in, which makes reading a codex impossible.

Warhammer nerds are crazy anyway, you might say, and the Nook was meant for normal people. Fine. Then tell me why the device is so monstrously slow. A delay between page loads long enough for me to start counting my Mississippis? Absolutely unacceptable. The problem with the Nook (and to a lesser extent, the Kindle) is that e-Ink technology just isn’t ready for prime time. I’ll grant you that it’s easier on the eyes than the unrelenting glow of an LCD screen, but that doesn’t make up for the slow refresh rates, compounded by the Nook’s myriad other missteps: the confusing navigation scheme, dodgy touch panel, curiously slow startup and load times, and propensity for crashing. I seriously doubt that we’ll look back at the Nook as something that defined modern computing.

But back to the Tall One’s Warhammer problem. If he wants a slim device capable of reading and zooming PDFs, he need look no further than the iPhone or iPod Touch. Aside from Apple’s built-in PDF support, there are apps for that. Several of them. The only real problem would be the tiny screen.

Which brings us, at last, to the iPad. This is clearly Apple’s answer to netbooks and e-readers, and that answer is, “They both suck.” E-readers suck because they are an immature, narrowly focused technology, and netbooks suck because they are nothing more than shrunken, anemic laptops. As Steve Jobs said at the start of his presentation, “They aren’t better at anything.” Instead of being built for ease of use or enjoyment, they are built for disposability. Does this sound like a product category with a future?

Instead, Apple has created a device that is built to be enjoyable. For the vast majority of computer users, the iPad does everything they will ever need it to do: email, web, photos, music, video. Most users do not want to bother with file systems. Most users do not want to bother with installing and configuring. This, I believe, is the device that Apple has been building towards since the day it introduced the world to the mouse. A device you hold in your hand, touch with your fingers, and just use. Calling this a “computer” is wrong. Computers started as things that compute, and ever since have had layer after layer of human-friendly interfaces grafted onto them. The iPad feels different, almost as if the interface came first, and the functions came later.

There’s a saying in computational neuroscience: “The hardware is the algorithm.” In other words, the brain does not distinguish between hardware and software. That’s what the iPad feels like to me. Naturalistic, intuitive hardware that engenders naturalistic, intuitive software. That’s the big innovation. That’s why the iPad is going to be much, much bigger than the skeptics think. It’s not a shrunken Macbook or an engorged iPhone. It’s an entirely new era in the way we interact with machines.