Eye See versus I See

One of the Webcomics I follow is currently featuring a character evolved from bees who has compound eyes. That got me to thinking about insects with their compound eyes and how they might see the world. . . People always show views through compound eye as a bunch of miniature full images. That's always bothered me, -- like it has to be wrong. Seems like they would see like one pixel of color/light/dark information from each lens which their brain would merge into a single picture -- like Georges Seurat's Pointillist paintings. It makes much more sense to see a single, large, albeit very grainy image, rather than 8 zillion tiny views of the same thing. If that's all they had to go by -- multiple very tiny but identical images, all of which had terrible resolution and very little useful info, -- how could an organism like that survive? How could they quickly spot and recognize danger or find food? I mean, Duh! Makes much more sense if their multiple lenses are trying to do what we do with our retinas -- create a complex full-scale image from a large number of single data points -- Doing it with lenses will work, but only up to a point (the point of diminishing returns) and that point is reached very quickly. Notice how all the animals with compound eyes are all small, short lived, reproduce quickly, and are successful pretty much because they breed in such statistical-overkill-enormous numbers that their survival is due more to the law of averages than anything else?-- Obviously,"evolution" realized pretty quickly it was on the wrong track and went with a single lens/image to refract and spread the light across ever increasing numbers of cones and rods of a retina, each of which sends its one pixel of info to our brains, and the brain resolves them into a single image. The more pixels, the higher the resolution and the more detailed the image is. -- like Duh! If you want to know which system works best, all you have to do is look around at which animals have compound lens eyes and which animals (like the one writing this blog, for instance) have single-lens eyes.

Which reminds me of one of the (many) things that "blew me out of" that old 1950's movie version of "War of the Worlds" starring Gene Barry. When they looked through the Martian "eye" thingie that Gene Barry chopped off with the ax. They got three separate, different colored images, red, blue and green that kind of overlapped a little and were really anemic looking. And those idiot scientists blathered on about That's how the Martians see us. (and, of course, the woman took one look at the image and screamed -- that's all women ever do in those stupid 1940's and 1950's movies is scream and have the vapors. Give me a break!) Some scientists! -- They of all people should know that it's not what the eye sees that counts-- that's all just raw data. It's what the brain sees that's important. If the Martians were smart enough to build those stupid flying saucer thingies with the death ray emitting street lamps on their noses, those "eye" thingies would have had some kind of processing software to integrate the data from those three different images into a single composite full color image -- -- which is exactly what the old cathode ray tube color TV process did. It had three "guns" (red, blue and green) firing pixel streams at the front of the tube. The three different single color images were superimposed on each other to create the full integrated color image -- It's the same idea the old technicolor film used. Duh. I've understood the process since Junior High, when the "green gun" blew out on the picture tube of our color TV. We had to watch pink and blue TV til we got it fixed. (I do have to admit that old movie did have some pretty cool sound effects, though. )

Critical Mess

Let me preface this by saying I love my mom. I wouldn't trade for her. She is one in a million. But in all honesty, she and I have some basic ideological differences. For instance, take the Great Sifting Project to remove all the oft-reviled little white rocks from my front yard, a project that took several stages and about 7 years to complete. When I had finished a sifting session, I would move the sifter back to the back yard, and put my tools away , but I never filled in the hole that marked the point between sifted and unsifted. Having a hole in my front yard that was about 18 inches deep by a couple of square yards was not a matter of concern to me. In fact, it was essential to the ongoing project, since it allowed me to pick up exactly where I left off, which might have been months or even a year ago. But every time my mom came by, she would remark on that "unsightly hole." It nearly drove her crazy. "Why don't you fill in that hole?" was a question I expected from her every time she came by. You see, my mom is a "neatnick." She is a fanatic about putting things away when you're done with them -- I mean, completely away, so there's no trace. If I was working on something and had to stop in the middle of it, I'd just leave it out, knowing that I would come back to it later. It seems to me an illogical waste of time to put everything away, only to have to get it all back out again later and set it up again so I could finish it. But not her. If you weren't actually working on something at that time, she wanted it cleaned up and put away, so that no trace remained. She is way more upset about the "piles of crud" in my office than I am, and I think she has set foot in my office maybe 4 times in the last 8 years.

Needless to say, she does not understand the concept of "critical mess." For instance, in my "Liberry," almost every square inch of six bookshelves is jammed crammed with books. They are pieced in like parquetry, with books turned sideways to squeeze into the space above the books that are wedged upright onto every shelf. They've been that way for at least a year, and are slowly but surely getting "jammed-er" and "crammed-er" every time I go surfing through the books for sale on Amazon.com. Literally for years, I've been plotting how to maximize every inch of available space in the "Liberry" - both floor space and shelf space because I've just about reached the point where solid geometry and the laws of physics will simply shut me down. I have a couple extra shelves, but the bookcase they fit cannot possibly accommodate any more books. However, I have determined that if I re-order and reorganize my general fiction section, I could squeeze two more shelves into a smaller bookcase, but the extra shelves are too wide and too deep to fit the bookcase in question. Then, last week, I took the shelves into the kitchen, got my saw horses and cut them down with my jigsaw. (I did put up the saw horses and jig saw, because I was through with them and vacuumed the kitchen floor.) That's as far as I've gotten. At some point soon, however, the "Liberry" will reach critical mess (probably when I'm trying to find a particular book and can't), and my spirit will be moved to pull out all the books and put the shelves where they need to go, and re-sort and re-shelve the books accordingly. But until then, I have more important things to think about, like, what I want to do with the box that's been on my dining room table for the past two months -- keep it or throw it away . . . . And one of these days, I'll get tired of walking around the vacuum cleaner in the "Liberry" and either finish vacuuming the living room, or just put the vacuum away. . . .