What is Digg?45 Comments
- dsignr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+32So squinting, in effect, changes the dynamics of your vitreous humor. I wonder if it can make me funnier...
I guess not, with a joke like that. - Strider817, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Another neat trick is to take a piece of paper and poke a small hole in it. Look through it and you'll have better vision.
- sockpuppets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Next up: beer goggles.
- snuffulupagus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11You sound like a markov chain text generator :/
- Nar1117, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10So remind me why I have to read the article? Cant i just read the description?
- praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -0/+8Yeah, I remember seeing that on Home Improvement.
- Arkonnan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@dsignr
If it didn't work for Gilbert Gottfried, it sure as hell isn't going to work for any of us. - vanstee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6its funny. i just watched the Seinfeld episode where George thinks someone steals his glasses. he squints and sees Jerry's girlfriend and his cousin making out but really its a police woman and a horse. great show.
- willmeister, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They missed the third reason that this works. Everyone's eyes suffer from some aberration (The light isn't focused perfectly from one visual plane onto the "plane" of your rods and cones. Generally, given constant optics, the primary way to prevent these effects is to reduce the aperture in front of the lens (in this case performed by the eyelid in addition to the iris). This is also why you see better in high light conditions (small iris opening) then in low light.
Ever wonder why there was that middle ground for bad vision where the state requires you drive with glasses during the dark only? That's the reason. - jackminardi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4so like jeopardy?
- friend18, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I was just wondering the question to this answer a week ago. Dugg.
- treys, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The improvement of vision with squinting is not due to internal changes within the eye. Moreover, while higher orders of aberration may be reduced, squinting will primarily improve acuity via increasing the depth of focus; offsetting refractive errors such as near/farsightedness and/or astigmatism. This is hardly new information as the medical term for a nearsighted patient, myope, is derived from Greek. ;) Literally it means, "One who squints."
- mikeflynn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They were mailboxes, you idiot. I didn't have the heart to tell you.
- duczduczducz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i was spottin those racoons!
- greyfade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@dsignr: i LOLed... :
- mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You guys need to get to an ADD clinic pronto.
- 1021, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Going to read this article squinting like I did the title and description.
- mandarin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Must been one of Rosie O' Donnel's written speeches...
- zarex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2[Marked as inaccurate.]
This article is totally wrong. Squinting doesn't change the shape of the eye, it decreases the aperture, increasing depth-of-field, just like a pinhole camera or a lens iris. It has nothing whatsoever to do with reshaping the cornea or the eye. Where do they get this stuff? - po43292, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2JERRY: They were mailboxes, you idiot. I didn't have the heart to tell you.
GEORGE: (noticing something) Hey look, a dime.
(George walks over to the other end of the room and picks up a dime) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Pin hole cameras work that way.
- FearlessFreep, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Who knows? I thought it pretty obvious to begin with
- clirk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As many of you have noted the information in that article is completely inaccurate.
Squinting benefits our ability to focus by bypassing refraction (the method by which light is focused by lenses eg. an SLR camera) and uses diffraction (focusing light by limiting peripheral rays and using a small aperture to "diffractively" focus light eg. Pinhole Camera). Higher animals like humans have a pupil that adjusts with light for a reason. If for example we all had tiny 1mm pupils it would serve us well in daylight situations and that is in fact why our pupils shrink in bright light. In a bright light situation the eye is not lacking light for detail and therefore can benefit from diffractive focus, thereby increasing depth of focus. However night time would result in disaster if our pupil remained 1mm. There would not be sufficient light for retinal receptors to respond. It would greatly limit our scotopic (dark-adapted) vision. So our pupil dilates to capture more light. This does induce more spherical aberration and is the main reason why we focus more poorly at night. Patients with small to moderate refractive error will often say they focus well during the day and yet notice significant blur at night.
As for the lens and cornea and any confusion regarding this. "Voltron" is in fact inaccurate. The human eye is an optical system with about 63 Diopters of total refractive power. Approximately 42-44 Diopters of the total ocular power is due the the cornea in fact. The remaining 20 Diopters or so is due to the crystalline lens. The crystalline lens is in fact "adjustable" and correctly it does accommodate to near focus by adjusting its power through shape change (eg. increasing in curvature for reading). This function is decreased with age which is why patients 40 and up start to need reading glasses (known as presbyopia). I am making some generalizations with my comments referring to focus etc and not getting into the complexities that are added when you factor in significant refractive error from myopia (near-sightedness), hyperopia (far-sightedness) and distortion due to astigmatism.
I hope this information helps :) - SixSence, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Editor's Note: This article was corrected to delete the erroneous statement that 'squinting squishes the eyeball slightly to correct for a focus point that misses the mark.' Although the lens does change shape, this is a reflex muscle action that can accompany (but is not the result of) squinting. LiveScience regrets the error."
- woodcoxcb, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You're eatin' onions and spottin' dimes!
- SuperCujo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1A little bit of news for you, light is electromagnetic waves, albeit a narrow band of the entire wavelength spectrum...
- SeanEtCetera, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is not the first comment I've seen by this person. It does read like random spam, doesn't it? I keep waiting for him to insert a computer generated image including stock prices into his comments.
- dmax801, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Decrease the size of the aperture and the light making its way to the film (retina) must be virtually parallel. Wider apertures allow light to come in through more angles - the narrower opening restricts all light rays except those coming straight in.
So, the light coming in straight, parallel, does not need to be focused through the cornea/lens complex. Squinting, therefore, makes it so that your natural errors in focusing (e.g., myopic or hyperopic - nearsighted or farsighted) aren't an issue.
That's why pinhole cameras work.
Squinting changing the shape of your eye? IDIOTIC and unscientific. Digg down, and some folks need to get out and learn something, instead of parroting crap as though it were truth.
dmax, MD - bwsot7m, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As a 23 year glasses wearer, i found this article quite informative
- Prometheus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What is this "reading the article" you refer to?
- voltron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"You're actually changing the shape of the cornea—your focusing lens."
Good God. There is a lens inside our eye called the crystalline lens which changes shape based on the proximity of any given focal point. This is a very basic butchery of anatomy and optics. The cornea isn't a "lens" at all, in the anatomical sense. Buried for innacuracy. - voltron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually, squinting induces something called the pinhole effect. Pinhole glasses do not change the shape of anything, yet a nearsighted person can see better through them. The asshat that wrote this article needs to study up on optics so they can end their pseudo-scientific babble. I swear, the idiots these random answer sites employ...Thanks diggers! Push that ***** to the top!
- ehuffty, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Haha good find. I just saw the Seinfeld episode today that deals with George's amazing eye sight when he squints.
- noswar45, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Seriously, who among us didn't squint at least once either during and immediately following reading this article?
- yakoff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"electromagnetic waves" hit the back of the eye? I always thought it was light.
- kebwi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0As I understand it, squinting also does something that is entirely unmentioned in the article. It brings your lashes down in front of your eye, so you are looking through a fine "grating". This grating acts more or less like a low-pass filter, essentially blurring out high frequency details and leaving you with a blurrier low-frequency image. This can be useful when you are trying to discern a heavy pattern that is ambiguated due to a noisy (noise is usually high frequency) surrounding pattern (like the "captcha" you have to discern in order to post to digg to get past the bot filter).
Try it. Look at the captcha for posting a message to digg. Then squint...adjust the squint variably. There will be a sweet spot where the characters are easy to read, easier than in the original captcha at any rate.
Since the suggestion is that the lashes-grating is simply a low-pass filter, you should be able to simulate it by low-pass filtering and image in Photoshop/Gimp/etc., and for the most part low-pass filtering an image does change the appearance of an image in approximately the same way as squinting at the original image. Voila.
One more example where this effect works really well is those mosaic photos that are all the rage: photos made up of pixels in which the pixels are tiny photos. You know what I'm talking about. Well, if you squint at those images, they filter out the high-frequency noise and leave you with a nice clear image. It's a very impressive effect actually.
Cheers! - DMUX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1interesting
- Wonderkind, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I wish you guys would post these things with a larger font. How do you expect me to read this stuff?
- ICSU, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I saw 'How Does Squirting Help Us See?' and was like now, I've heard it all.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I used to take my thumb and index fingers on each hand and put them together and look through the little square of open space between them.
It'd be interesting to see just how much you can improve your vision with these types of methods. Take someone with, say, 20-60 vision or something...not too terrible, but definitely requiring glasses) and have them try to read an eye chart with squinting only, then with a pinhole in a piece of paper, an then with the finger method I described. I wonder just how bad someone can be and still get back to 20-20 like this. - juscal, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0I always thought that squiting changed the shape, or just modified the eye.
- idonthack, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Ew. Who would make out with a horse?
- Crass22, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3And the wreckage was spotted by an off-duty police officer after Foley suspected of drunken driving approached the officer. Performance-enhancing drugs also have plagued the league. In one case Shawne Merriman an all-star linebacker for the defensive player of the in the Java sea with more than two days ago that left Denver 9-7 for the use of passports. An official of the prodigal party members back to the fold. Bring on no 1 Ohio State but it's not going to start their session tomorrow, they should make a New Eve birthday party for Martin. The Denver Post reported on its Web site. Posted earlier this month Spears noted that in recent nights out _ one in which receiver Dwayne Jarrett split two Michigan defenders, en route to a major study, out Tuesday showing that one or two drinks a day doesn't appear to boost their heart attack similar to several Usc Bowl games earlier this month.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -50/+6Well I think one of the first things you have to understand is why we fight each other. The Toronto Blue Jays are an improved team offensively, but their pitching is severely lacking. I'm a big fan of brocolli and pasta. The weather seems nice, but is overrated. Elmo on Sesame Street rules. I miss my dog...she died last summer at the age of 15. Kevin Smith is a great director and should continue to overthrow the demons of the past. Pickles, seagull, peanut butter, toaster, biting on lip.
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