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The blind man who taught himself to see

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Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#51

Post by Xurinos »

yuvadam wrote: post #9
rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

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

Beautiful question. You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.

I read something recently by a blind guy who said that sometimes he perceived some amount of light in his dreams. This was because his blindness is not complete blindness. There are varying degrees of it. In his case, he could detect some light changes.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#52

Post by estel »

beaumartinez wrote: post #25
estel wrote: post #6

Please please please don't link to pages that open the print dialog :(

It's probably the only all-in-one-page version of the article. Although I do agree the dialog popping up at the beginning is annoying, it's only one click (or key) to dismiss it; I prefer that to having to click on several "next page" links.

Then surely it makes sense to link to the root page which has a (single-click) link to the print page?

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#53

Post by JacobAldridge »

aplusbi wrote: post #11

Here's a teenager who could do the same thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4 The video is from when he was 14, he died from cancer at 16.

I saw Ben's story on a documentary or news program a few years ago, and it was the first thing I thought of reading this article. I had no idea he had died - a sad note to a series of uplifting life stories.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#55

Post by gcv »

edw519 wrote: 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?

For the first time in my life, I truly wish I had the money to be an angel investor.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#56

Post by enjo »

jonnathanson wrote: post #50
brandnewlow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

Didn't Diaspora raise all of that cash through Kickstarter with basically nothing in return?

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#57

Post by jonnathanson »

enjo wrote: post #56
jonnathanson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mod…

Didn't Diaspora raise all of that cash through Kickstarter with basically nothing in return?

I think the jury's still out on Diaspora. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being. That's my polite and respectful way of saying yes to you here.

But it's the case in point. Diaspora raised what would otherwise have been VC or angel dollars. Kickstarter isn't the platform for that. It's a bootstrapping platform optimized for product sales.

The people who succeed on Kickstarter have a) finished or finishable products that b) can be sold via "donations" on Kickstarter. This is because the patrons/backers on Kickstarter are far more likely to fork over their $50 and receive something tangible in return than they are to donate $50 to support a dream.

I'm a big fan of the Kickstarter concept. Huge fan. But human nature dictates the limits and strengths of its use cases. Your audience on Kickstarter is consumers, not financiers. These are consumers who receive no equity or charitable tax deduction for their "donations," and who will thus "donate" primarily in exchange for privileged or early access to a cool product. Or maybe to get their names in the back of the book. Whatever. Point is, they want to buy something. Inevitably, then, it becomes a sales and marketing platform and not a venture capital platform.

It's theoretically possible that the next Apple would come out of Kickstarter, but not the next Facebook.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#58

Post by hypersoar »

vaporstun wrote: post #38
stevejohnson wrote: post #33

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 stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. Put on some headphones and listen to this and tell me you cannot visualize it in 3-D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxaOO6PsAw This is a binaural recording. More info on these here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording You can hear in multiple dimensions because, as the original article mentions…

I listened to these so much several years ago (in particular one with somebody shaking a matchbox) that my brain apparently realized, to some extent, that it was being tricked. Ever since then, recordings like this don't work properly. Anything that's supposed to sound like it's coming from in front of me gets flipped around so that it's behind me. It's very strange.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#59

Post by davidhollander »

maeon3 wrote: 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...

You wouldn't be able to hear someone walking from behind you, or to your side, or around a corner. This emulates a low refresh rate, very limited field of vision at the cost of reduced hearing. What he's interested in is absolute gains in hearing. I don't think trying to emulate a worse copy of vision fits with his philosophy.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#60

Post by aplusbi »

maeon3 wrote: post #44
aplusbi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I stand corrected. It's hard to tell from the video.
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