[HN Gopher] Tim Doucette, a blind astronomer who built the Deep ...
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Tim Doucette, a blind astronomer who built the Deep Sky Eye
Observatory
Author : noyesno
Score : 81 points
Date : 2024-07-07 16:04 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amiplus.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amiplus.ca)
| noyesno wrote:
| Also: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-290-russian-doping-
| ass...
| jvm___ wrote:
| That's an unfortunate URL abbreviation
| https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-290-russian-doping-ass
| interludead wrote:
| Remarkable power of resilience and passion! Tim Doucette's story
| is incredibly inspiring
| spullara wrote:
| he sees better than other people for this use case
| nyjah wrote:
| Off-topic, but I was watching this golf instructional video from
| the 70's or 80s by Gary Player. And he's talking about all the
| different golfers he's played with and he mentions this blind
| golfer,
|
| "Blind golfer offered to play me a round for $100/hole. He had
| two rules. We play his home course and we tee off at midnight."
| nyjah wrote:
| Initially when I made the comment I was hurrying and forgot the
| blind gentlemen's name. It was Charley Boswell. Just thought
| his name deserved to be in my original comment but too late to
| edit ..
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Boswell
| nativeit wrote:
| I couldn't play the video on iPad OS Safari. Just FYI. Sounds
| interesting.
| Xen9 wrote:
| Human evolutionary history may beg to differ in that the nervous
| system has evolved to be optimal for processing input from the
| natural senses; but the mighty truth is it is all mere signals.
| With sufficiently biochemically sophisticated interfaces, and
| potentially medicine to ease the adaption, any signal source can
| become a sense. I must underline that a link between "a sense"
| and the neurvous system can be monodirectional but "should" be
| bi-directional; if we give a person a sense as the ability to
| percieve the traffic of an arbitary server, we will be humane and
| ALSO give them the eyelids to ignore and open their perception of
| the ports. Which parts of the brain are best for such
| interfacing? I believe the commonly spread understanding of the
| notion of a sense must be uncomplete; were one sense closed,
| there is no reason we could not put two senses in its place. I
| imagined sort of graph structure connecting senses but this
| intuition hide away partially, and I cannot elaborate it further
| now...
| free_energy_min wrote:
| In case it's interesting, the book Livewired talks about this.
| The author also has a company called Neosensory which converts
| sound into physical vibrations on a wristband
| raducu wrote:
| > any signal source can become a sense.
|
| A new sense?
|
| That's unheard of. We can map any signal to an existing sense,
| but not create a new sense/sensation.
|
| That would be one of the most relevant developments in human
| history and a gigantic step towards cracking the whole qualia
| problem.
| ryanjamurphy wrote:
| I suppose the extreme version of the parent comment's vision
| would be to develop entirely new neurological circuits that
| can process, interpret, and integrate some arbitrary new
| source of data in the world. I agree that that's kind of
| unimaginable now, but give infinite monkeys infinite
| typewriters and one of them will probably hook up the
| company's sales data to a new section of cortex just to see
| what would happen.
|
| I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can --
| and do -- develop new "senses" for any given signal we can
| perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social
| media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with
| a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social
| networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different
| ways.
|
| This has practical implications: given that we don't have
| infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment
| bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital
| senses have our attention.
|
| There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition;
| [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about
| "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].
|
| Interesting to think about!
|
| [1]: Especially DARPA's work and similar -- https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition#DARPA's_Au... [2]:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628680
| Xen9 wrote:
| If one's eyes were replaced with the signal generator, I
| believe the parts of brain that process vision normally could
| adapt to this almost as well aa if a "new" sense had evolved.
| Full adaptation may require that it's done as a child or use
| of some drugs / theraphy. Perhaps trasncranial stimulation
| could be used in one form of adaptation theraphy.
| cdf wrote:
| Cant watch from my location, just want to know if he is the
| inspiration for the blind character in my favourite movie,
| Contact.
| shariqm wrote:
| if you can't view the video in the link from your location, it's
| on youtube too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHKopqVI_cw
| fazmi wrote:
| Oadylkzhidpzhydzhrzhuoeuzheeeenu
| mad_tortoise wrote:
| Not available in my location: "There was a problem providing
| access to protected content."
|
| Please let me know if someone has a mirror/alternate link.
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