3D movies are messing with your depth perception

Apparently when you watch a 3D movie with those annoying glasses (people like me, have to sit for a couple hours ridiculously wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time), the experience messes with your depth perception, leading to a condition called “binocular dysphoria”. Mark Pesce, who did virtual reality development work for Sega in the 90s writes about this phenomenon:

Virtual reality headsets use the same technique for displaying 3D as we find in movies or 3D television sets – parallax. They project a slightly different image to each one of your eyes, and from that difference, your brain creates the illusion of depth. That sounds fine, until you realize just how complicated human depth perception really is. The Wikipedia entry on depth perception (an excellent read) lists ten different cues that your brain uses to figure out exactly how far away something is. Parallax is just one of them. Since the various movie and television display technologies only offer parallax-based depth cues, your brain basically has to ignore several other cues while you’re immersed in the world of Avatar. This is why the 3D of films doesn’t feel quite right. Basically, you’re fighting with your own brain, which is getting a bit confused. It’s got some cues to give it a sense of depth, but it’s missing others. Eventually your brain just starts ignoring the other cues.

That’s the problem. When the movie’s over, and you take your glasses off, your brain is still ignoring all those depth perception cues. It’ll come back to normal, eventually. Some people will snap right back. In others, it might take a few hours. This condition, known as ‘binocular dysphoria’, is the price you pay for cheating your brain into believing the illusion of 3D. Until someone invents some other form of 3D projection (many have tried, no one has really succeeded), binocular dysphoria will be part of the experience.

The problem isn’t so much 3D movies, though. It’s when the leap comes to 3D TVs and 3D computer games. Pesce postulates that the hours that kids could spend in front of a 3D display might, alarmingly, ruin depth perception… permanently. I don’t know if there is any medical basis for Pesce’s article, but it sounds plausible (but don’t all urban legends sound plausible?).

  1:13am  •  Consumer Electronics  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Some questions arising from The Social Network

In The Social Network, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s slighted CFO gets his shareholdings diluted from about 35% all the way down to 0.03%, while the other shareholders maintain their holdings in proportion. I have a reasonable understanding about how VC investment works, but I didn’t understand how this was possible. Others have wondered the same thing.

In reality (if you believe what was reported by Gawker), Saverin appears to have been regarded by Zuckerberg to have been holding up the progress of the business. To reduce the influence on company affairs that came with a shareholding as substantial as Saverin’s, Zuckerberg incorporated a Delaware Corporation (as happened in the movie), which then acquired the outgoing Florida LLC. Saverin was simply given less shares in the new corporation. Litigation and Trial writes that if this was the case, it was a “blatant violation of fiduciary duty and a blatant act of minority shareholder oppression”. The problem can be kind of solved by a shareholder ratification of the action, but are we really to believe that Saverin would have just signed off on something like that? (It seems like he really did make $300k betting on futures, so he surely would’ve been able to get legal advice on the deal.)

Anyway, post-settlement, Saverin owns about 5% of the company, making him a billionaire.

Litigation and Trial also writes an interesting article about why Zuckerberg won’t sue for defamation.

And moving off the legal issues, Jezebel questions the unflattering portrayal of women in the movie.

Random trivia: apparently, where I sit at work now is about 5 metres away from where Zuckerberg used to sit (a couple years ago when Facebook was still in downtown PA).

  8:54pm  •  Law  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The Social Network

This movie was much better than I thought it would be when it was first announced. Much of it is written with liberal doses of poetic license, but the dialog is sharp, snappy, humorous, and often cuttingly witty. And some things are still based on fact. Go see it.

And who else tried looking for his LiveJournal page?

  1:10am  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

European Delivery – driving Europe in a new car

There is a lesser known program where, if you are a U.S. resident, you can go to a European car dealer in America – BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, or Volvo – and ask them for European Delivery, or “ED” as its known on online car forums. The car will be built in Germany (or Sweden) and you will have to fly over to Europe to pick it up.

Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, when you pick up the car, you get to drive it around Europe for a few weeks. And, because you’ll likely be starting in Germany, you get a chance to try out your new car on the autobahns. The only problem is you still have to break in the engine, so that could be frustrating. (Apparently the recommended break in for a BMW is maximum 4k rpm or 100mph for the first 1000 miles – which might be frustrating on the autobahns, so maybe you could drive around Europe and then come back to Germany near the end of the trip.) At the end of the holiday, you drop off the car at one of the drop-off points around Europe, some of which are outside of Germany, and it will get shipped to you, arriving in your neighborhood 1-2 months later.

The kicker is that buying a car on ED is going to cost you several thousands of dollars less than buying it locally (unless you’re getting a Porsche, which actually charges a premium for this option). The reason is that some of the commissions and fees and taxes that get charged along the way disappear. So, the discount will basically fund the cost of your holiday in Europe, with change to spare, even if you bring someone along to share the experience. The manufacturers will even throw in a couple weeks of free auto insurance, and temporarily load up the GPS system with European maps, while you’re there.

And you can do ED on lease (which might get past the break in thing, although you’ll possibly spoil the car for the next lessee or owner). If you’re thinking of buying a car… what a great idea for a vacation.

The New York Times recently wrote an article about this, but this program has been floating around for many years.

Other links:

• Test Driving Your Saab in the Arctic Circle (Wall Street Journal article from 2007, before Saab became insolvent and went into administration)
• European Delivery 101
• About BMW ED
• Leasing via ED
• An explanation why ED is cheaper than local U.S. delivery

  11:17am  •  Travel  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

When gut instinct is wrong

This short MoJo article observes a few things in life that are counterintuitive.

Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.

Obvious but wrong. As Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald explained at the time, if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren’t very dangerous.

  7:28pm  •  Opinions & Observations  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Milky Way over Tahoe Time Lapse Video

  9:37am  •  Miscellaneous  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The Reading Pile

I’ve decided to start dumping the bulk of the lengthy, interesting articles I read onto a separate site at read.hearye.org. I’ll keep the most interesting ones for this site.

I’m also too cheap to buy Instapaper so this is the way I store stuff that I want to come back to read later on my iPad.

(Oh, and if anyone wants to contribute to it, let me know and I’ll set you up with a posting account.)

  12:13am  •  Site News  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

“Valium, he gave me Valium”

Dad occasionally tells me interesting stories about his encounters with patients (all on a strictly anonymous basis, of course). This was a good one he sent me the other day:

After over 30 years in general practice, you gain a sixth sense for when a patient is actually a drug addict trying to scam a prescription from you. Such was the case yesterday. Just before closing time, in walked a new patient – a young man in his early twenties with a tattooed forearm. He was from out of town, which always rings alarm bells. They come in at the last minute because they think that you are eager to go home and will honour their request quickly. They have often tried all of the doctors in their home area who have quickly become familiar with their stories. Of course these facts in themselves do not make them guilty. However, when they come to you with an elaborate story then the red flag really goes up.

As stories go this was a real doozie.

He started by saying he would let me in on a secret. He had booked a flight to take his girlfriend to New York later that night where he was going to propose to her in the Empire State Building on the 7th anniversary of their initial meeting, which happened to be on the 27/9. His girfriend was still in the dark about it. As he was petrified of flying, he needed something to calm him down. “Something a previous doctor gave me,” he said, but confessing that he forgot what it was. Instantly I was aware that he wanted a script for Valium. But I acted dumb and said that since I do not know what the other doctor had prescribed, I was unable to help him. He screwed up his face and pretended to think hard for a few seconds, before exclaiming: “Valium, he gave me valium!”

Most drug addicts will not come straight up and ask for what they want. That would be too obvious, so they rather manoeuvre you in such a way that you offer it to them. If it is not the right one, they will say that they are allergic to it and you propose another until they get what they want.

As he was consulting with me on the evening of 27/9, I told him that it was physically impossible for him to be at the Empire State Building by the 27th. He said that I had not accounted for the fact that New York was a day behind (which of course I knew). I thought to myself that even if he were to fly off immediately after seeing me, he would still not make it to NY on time as he had to transit in LAX or SFO. So I baited him and casually asked him when his flight was that evening and he replied that he needed to be at the airport at 9pm. He even volunteered the information that he needed to be there at least a couple of hours before his flight. I know that there is a curfew at Sydney airport from 11pm, and it is most unlikely that any airline will schedule a departure time at 11pm. I then explained why I didn’t think that he would be flying off at 11pm and asked him what airline he would be using. He hesitated and, sounding unsure, said Qantas. To prove that Qantas does not fly to LAX in the evening, I logged into the Sydney airport site and showed him that he had already missed his flight.

He was still adamant that he had a flight to catch that evening and said that it was probably at 10pm and not 11pm. I again explained that it was not possible. Qantas does not fly to LAX at that time of the night. Then he finally accepted that fact and said that he screwed up. But it was not over yet.

To prove that he was still going to NY, he then “rang” his girlfriend up and explained the situation to her, then told her to ring up Qantas to rebook the flight for the next day even if he had to “pay a thousand dollars more” (all this without giving her any other details). I’m sure the gf must have been hysterical to find out that she was booked to fly to NY in a couple of hour, but even though I was sitting just across from him, I could not hear her voice at all. Maybe she had a soft voice but I’m not convinced that anyone was on the other line.

In the end I did not honour his request for a script for Valium. To my surprise, he did not get angry – he was just embarrassed to be caught out.

Moral of the story: don’t screw with a doctor who has been practising for longer than you have been alive.

  9:31pm  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Perpetual bonds

There is a class of bonds, called perpetuities, that do not have a maturity date and keep paying off forever (or at least until they are redeemed). “Consols” are perpetual bonds issued by the British government, and the 2.5% 1923 series has been paying out coupons for almost a century now, having come from a long lineage of bonds starting in the 18th century. They are relatively rare, but recently there has been some demand for them.

  8:45pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •