Retina Quotes

“They knew where they were headed but they didn’t know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice’s fate. Retina was adamant no one knew him. Lorenzo didn’t care about anything much but reaching Zharfar after Retina surgically removed his Unicell Groper. They were headed to Africa in what seemed a semi commercial private plane. Eight people including the pilots travelled. They weren’t supposed to know any more particulars. But Lorenzo’s watch placed the coordinates in both numbers and words. They were in West Africa, country Nigeria, state Osun, and township Isura. None of them had ever heard of it, the town, but they were there. And they had travelled for miles, over highly forested nonresidential areas and mountain peaks before they stopped. Wherever they were going was greatly isolated, Roma thought.”

“Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?”

“...we take care not to touch each other in public, nor do we look into each other's eyes except furtively, because Ivan must first wash my eyes with his own, removing the images which landed on my retina before his arrival.”

“The challenge is quite formidable if you spell it out explicitly: artists must look at a three-dimensional scene with their two-dimensional retinas and then generate a two-dimensional painting that appears three-dimensional to viewers who look at it with their two-dimensional retinas.”

“You will need to verify your identity with a sacrifice.""Didn't you ever hear of retina scans? Maybe fingerprints? Something less invasive?”

“If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.”

“For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can.”

“If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.”

“Google's colourful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year - an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.”