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Saturday, Jan 20, 2024 - 00:53 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Just Say The Words

We've waited nearly eight years for this, but the returning blockbuster of Republican Primaries (2024 edition) has proven to be less entertaining than hoped for, with The Donald winning the Iowa caucuses in an unprecedented landslide - and perhaps more worryingly, with 68% of participants believing that Biden didn't legitimately win the last election, from entrance polls. Well, I personally believe that this issue should be dropped, but with broadcasters such as CNN and NBC refusing to air the victory speech of a major Presidential candidate, it's difficult to state that American popular democracy is in a good place.

So, it's looking like there won't be any juicy primary drama unlike the legendary 2016 edition and the still-pretty-funny 2020, and while the establishment Republicans remain frantically trying to impeach the sitting POTUS - supposedly with majority support in their party - to try and boost his election chances (with TRUMP now about twice as likely to win compared to Biden, according to major betting house odds), I remain of the opinion that the U.S. Congress might, y'know, concentrate on their actual jobs for once. Sadly, news that the FBI was lying on the authenticity of the Hunter laptop back in 2019 (Russian disinfo, they said) will only provide more ammunition for this case, with the Prodigal Son himself now set to testify at the end of February.


Myopia Followup

Continuing on from last November's comment on myopia treatment, there's been a Wired article on work by Taiwanese ophthalmologists, in particular the Tian-Tian 120 program that prescribes two hours of outdoor time for schoolkids each day. It supposedly reduced myopia prevalence some 5% (from 50% in 2011), before getting interrupted by the pandemic.

On this, the confound for the supposed predominant cause of dopamine (from [natural/[ultra]violet?] light) on eye lengthening (as opposed to a lack of focus/accommodation) remains, which might have one wonder at the seeming lack of direct experiments to disentangle these factors. Personally, I recall the use of an interesting contraption in my youth, towards trying to control my own myopia (mostly failed); it consisted of a microscope-type lens into a box, in which various slides (mostly of landscapes) were rotated through, at various degrees of blurriness, ostensibly to (artificially) stimulate accomodation of the eyeball (thus "exercising" it, as advertised)

Actually, does this work as intended?

Towards this, a quick riddle - consider a room with a window, that has a nice view of, say, faraway mountains. This would of course be very helpful in exercising one's eyes during breaks, by looking out of the window. However, say that the window has to be boarded up, perhaps due to refurbishment of the building facade. Then, would sticking a poster showing the original mountain view on the wall, provide the same effect on the eye's focus when looking at the poster instead?


Does it make a difference?
(Sources: pixabay.com, flickr.com)


About this, the answer is: no, there is a difference - when one looks out of the window at faraway objects, the focus is (essentially) at infinity, while looking at a poster on the wall (if of the same scene) has the focus remain near (i.e. distance to the wall). Extrapolating slightly from this, "outdoor" might not necessarily imply proper focus adjustment in urban built-up areas, where most of the objects that one looks at are relatively nearby anyway - before we get to outdoor TikTok-ing.

Then, it could be interesting to try and settle the impact of eyeball accomodation on myopia with an animal (perhaps pigs, from their anatomical similarities) model, to see if limiting focus (while maintaining light levels) does in fact affect eyeball development; one gathers that axial length (i.e. mostly myopia) can be measured throughout with a biometer nowadays, and in any case similar experiments have been attempted previously, for example the famous kitten-stripe investigation that established that if kittens were exposed only to vertical lines for the first few months of their life, they would only be able to see vertical lines, but not horizontal ones, thereafter.


ETF WTF


Still less flashy than Ben Franklin with laser eyes


The return of H.L. Ham to business has seen the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approve spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) last week... as their Twitter/X account got hacked to spoof an early announcement, and this after tweeting that "the best source of information about the SEC is the SEC". That first short-lived pump to some US$48000 done with, there would be another headfake, as some staffer apparently released the approval document on their website, before the official statement - which saw US$49k reached, and the selling the news thereof began. Well, it's closer to US$41k right now, and the hamsters are sitting and waiting having pocketed an easy mil or two on the swing, with the halving due in April.


Lost In Translation

With all the hype (and accompanying governance proposals) about generative AI recently, there may have been some prickliness about even doctors and AI developers losing jobs - to which I can only say that there will be more than enough employment pains to go around, for most roles.

One area where generative AI might not have had too much of an impact yet, might be in language translation. Take for example the Mandarin post from last December, translated by ChatGPT (with appropriate initial prompt), Google Translate and DeepL. None are what I would consider anywhere near (human-)professional quality (though to be fair, the writing was in a relatively dense style), with each app having their own strengths and weaknesses (e.g. DeepL not recognizing the intended meaning of 色鬼, instead going for the literal "colorful ghost"), and with all three having problems with long-range co-references (all rendered 酒 near the end as "wine", instead of understanding it as "beer" from Bud Light early on)

Eh, I suppose it's good that there remains space for research then, since (quality, machine) translation was part of what led me to dabbling in linguistics in the first place...


Wherefore All These Tears

And a final comment on the Million Tears trance song from the second Mandarin post in December, and its accompanying caption of 假作真時真亦假 (i.e. "when falsehoods are accepted as truth, truth also becomes false", also badly translated by machine); it is perhaps the most famous couplet from the Dream of the Red Chamber*, itself perhaps the preeminent classic of Chinese literature. It supports the frame story of the novel, which has a Magic Stone water a Crimson Flower until the latter gained sentience. As such, when the stone (thus the alternative title of the novel as The Story of the Stone) incarnated into the human world as a boy, the flower followed as a girl, to "repay him with all the tears able to be shed for the whole of a mortal lifetime" (it didn't end well)

So, the natural question is: would a million tears be enough?

Various sources have the average human producing 64 liters of tears in a lifetime, which when considered together with an average tear volume of some 5 to 7uL, appears to imply some 9.1 to 12.8 million tears for a lifetime. Guess Daiyu might need to supply more than just a million there, then! On a sidenote, this subconscious connection might just have contributed to the song becoming popular with the... more underground elements of local Singaporean society, to the point that it has all but become an unofficial national anthem.

[*And fiendishly hard to translate well too.]



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