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The blind man who taught himself to see

mensjournal.com

41–50 of 87 posts

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#41

I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences: "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. "We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.

>We hear in one dimension, left-to-right.

While our localization abilities vary by axis, we do have them in all three directions due to the combination of several mechanisms, none of which are actually 'left-to-right'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#43

How do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?

On Reddit recently, in an "I am blind, ask me anything" thread, this comment appeared:

"Do you see blackness all the time?"

"No, I don't know what blackness is; I see the same as you see out of the bottom of your feet".

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#44
post #19
post #5

Not sure why he wouldn't use this, this seems vastly superior to the system he uses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=playe...

I don't know about that. While that system is clearly easier to use, from what I've heard about echolocation it provides much more detail than that system. If you look at my other post, I linked to a video of a kid who used echolocation. He could distinguish objects - he walked past two garbage cans in the street, and said "Is that a car? clicks his tongue several times No, it's a garbage can."

I used the software I linked to above (I'm not blind), you can download it to a laptop, plug in a webcam and earphones. I could tell the difference between a car and a garbage can with no practice at all. Can he click with his tongue and tell if the picture on the wall is a picture a square or a circle? No, this software can enable him to do that.

I'd like to get his opinion of this: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#45
post #14
post #7

No more print articles, please. I'm tired of print dialogs popping up, un-asked-for. Use Readability if you don't like the layout. http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-...

It was probably done to get the article onto one page, not the five that the normal article is.

Incidentally, I think readability attempts to get the whole article onto one page via js.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#46
post #35
post #20

Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?

Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet". If he got th…

Part of it involves surgery - which might be tricky to do incrementally.

It also doesn't sound as though he knows much about startup methodology or has the personality or desire to solve the bootstrapping problem. He's seems like a domain expert but not an entrepreneur.

I guess that means a lot of blind people will have fewer opportunities.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#47

He's Daredevil!

For those who don't know - Daredevil is a comic book character who is blind but has trained his other senses to compensate.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics)

Not an amazing contribution to the thread but relevant and hardly worthy of punishing with downvotes.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#48
"Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom."

Pain is part of the price of freedom. That's a truth that could use to be applied more widely.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#49
post #20

Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?

Kickstarter.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#50
post #20

Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?

Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is a great platform for sales and marketing once you've got a functional and scalable prototype. It's not a great place to raise exploratory / research funding.

If you look at the history of Kickstarter's most successful projects, they tend to resemble pre-sales more than "donations." There's usually a product delivered at X level of individual funding, and 90% of the funding comes in at X level.

This model is fantastic for launching new products that are ready to go upon receipt of funding. It's not as successful for raising money for R&D.

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