[geeks] Hello?

der Mouse mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA
Wed Jul 18 18:33:42 CDT 2007


> The real limit is the resolution of the person's eyes.  Of course
> there is an s-load of processing going on in the retina.

And the early layers of the brain...and the late layers of the brain,
too, for that matter.  There's a lot of individual variation, and
there's processing going on that makes the effective resolution of the
eye something like a factor of 5-10 better than you'd think from the
size of the receptors (the eye position jitters around, sampling with
the physical receptor boundaries at many different places).

I'm rather aware of this, because my visual acuity has always been
unusually good; people look at my screen and go "how can you read stuff
that tiny?" when I could actually do fine at even smaller sizes.  But
that's far from the whole story.  I once visited a currency museum with
my gf; one thing they had was a display of three real banknotes and
three forgeries.  The forgeries were really bad - they looked like
inkjet-printer dithered printouts - but my gf said she couldn't see the
difference.  !!!

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