Memorial Day

This past weekend was the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S. For my non-American readers (both of you), Memorial Day is a holiday created to remember those who've died in military service to the country. It was originally celebrated after the American Civil War in the late 1860's. Of course, now days, it is being morphed into another consumer holiday (BIG Memorial Day SALE!!! TWO DAYS ONLY!) as all U.S. holidays are.

As an acknowledgement to its origins, many Americans visit cemetaries on the holiday weekend to remember lost loved ones, and there are generally some formal ceremonies around the country to honor veterans and war dead. Beyond that, it signals the "official" beginning of Summer and many celebrate it by spending the weekend at a local beach or lake and/or doing outdoor grilling.

This year the wife and I set up our pool (such as it is) and did some charcoal grilling for dinner on Monday. Here are a couple of photos to help share the experience!



Here's a batch of chicken kabobs cooking on the grill. Maybe I'll get around to looking up the recipe to post, because these are really good!



And here's Elly, our Welsh Corgi trying to get a look at what smells so good. She's definitely hoping to celebrate the holiday with us! (And she did get some leftovers.)

Home

It's all we've got.

Photos courtesy NASA
Hi-Rez versions available here.

Building Reality

In the book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by neurobiologist Margaret S. Livingstone, we learn the acuity of the human eye is surprisingly low. The eye's full resolution is only available in the very center of our gaze in an area slightly larger than a thumbnail and it drops off rapidly from there. The image below is an approximation of how much of a printed page is sharply in focus for us when reading.



Let me emphasize, this image is a rough approximation. Obviously, you can reproduce this "experiment" for real by taking a printed page and choosing a word in the text to look at. Keep your gaze on that one word and notice how much of the surrounding text you can see in focus. Admittedly, it's kind of tricky to do this, because the natural inclination is to shift your gaze to adjoining words as you try to see them.

Studies made of how we read show our eyes constantly shift along the line we are reading, jumping ahead a word or two and backtracking a word or two. Thus, we get the illusion that the whole page is in focus rather than just the word or two in the center of our gaze. When we are seeing our environment, the same principle is at work. Our gaze constantly shifts on our surroundings. From this constantly shifting gaze, our brain builds the illusion of the in-focus world we "think" we see, and it does all this in real time!

I would posit that visual perception plays a large part in the widely held "common sense" theory of perception, "naive realism". But, the more you learn about visual perception, the more you realize how much the picture of reality in our heads is constructed in our minds rather than being a one-to-one reflection of the reality that is "out there".