Yesterday morning I had the first of two operations to replace the cataract-ridden lenses of my eyes with synthetic replacements. Everything went smoothly, and I now have 20/20 distance vision in my right eye.
We got to the surgery center at 6:15am,and the worst part of the morning – having an IV inserted less smoothly than usual – was soon over. I’m used to having eye drops to dilate my eyes for examinations, but for the operation we went a bit further. After the usual drops, the nurse placed a tiny drug-soaked sponge (about the size of a grain of rice) under my eyelid, and taped my eyes shut for 20 minutes. The result was suitably impressive. (Iris? What iris?) I spoke briefly to the anesthesiologist, who had previously handled one of my kidney stone treatments, and then I was whisked off to the operating room.
Although I was awake for the procedure, I don’t remember many details. The staff spoke very little, so I couldn’t even cue off their interactions. It seemed to go very much the same as the videos that I linked to in my previous blog piece on the subject. From my side of the eyeball, it was a spectacular light show: mostly pulsating yellows, reds, and cyans, with occasional periods of intense blue and green. There was no discomfort at all. And suddenly I found myself being wheeled into the recovery room, and given a drink of apple juice.
The following morning, I was back at the doctor’s for a post-op check. The pressure in my eye was slightly elevated, which is not unusual, and the doctor applied some eye drops to help to reduce it. As for reading the eye chart, I rattled off the 20/20 line with little difficulty. So now I simply have to keep taking the eye drops until all three bottles are finished, protect the eye against water and rubbing (I sleep with a shield taped over the eye), and show up for another check-up next week. And then in October, after I get back from the OpenStack summit in Boston, we’ll go through the whole procedure again for the left eye.
So what’s it like? Well, the clarity is amazing. I spent most of yesterday with my left eye taped shut, so I could concentrate on the new lens. (I keep wanting to call it my “new eye”.) Things are in focus down to about two feet; closer than that I need reading glasses. I’ve tried a couple of different strengths from the local pharmacy, but I still haven’t got used to them.
Without the clouding of the cataracts, everything looks much brighter, cleaner, and less yellow. At first it was quite amazing, particularly as I tried blocking first one eye and then the other. A chair which I had always thought was olive green now appears simply grey, while a wall that I had seen as cream-colored is now bone-white. However 36 hours later I’m starting to take the brightness and color shift for granted. (This may also be due to the return of my eye to its usual size.)
With my “old eye” patched, I obviously lost depth perception, so I’ve been trying to work with both eyes open. At distance, or when watching TV, my brain seems to take the clear image from my right eye and ignore the fuzzy data from my left, although I do get some slight sensation of depth. Reading or working with the computer is tougher. I use a pair of reading glasses, but the visual sensations are quite inconsistent as I move my eyes across the screen or from the screen to the keyboard. It’s quite a strain, and I can’t do it for long without getting a headache; if that doesn’t improve, I may have to revert to an eye-patch. Obviously I’m not going to be driving for a couple of days, but on Sunday I hope to be back behind the wheel. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Perhaps the biggest change, and one that I didn’t anticipate, is the result of a lifetime of myopia. Ever since I was a very small boy, when anything was visually unclear, or required careful attention, my instinct has been to bring it close to my eyes. If I was trying to disentangle a knot, or thread a needle, I would remove my glasses and peer at the object as close as possible. Suddenly, my world has been turned upside down: the closer I bring things, the less clearly I can see them. For some reason, this simple inversion affected me quite profoundly.
Overall, I’m simply delighted. The next couple of weeks, with one “new” and one “old” eye, are going to be a bit weird, but I don’t anticipate any problems. And I can’t wait for the next operation….
Author: geoff
Countdown to cataract surgery
So I’ve started the countdown to my first cataract surgery. I wasn’t going to blog much about this, but I’ve found that although the web is full of text and video links for cataract surgery (in humans and other animals!), most are commercial or professional pieces. There seem to be relatively few first-person accounts of what it’s like to experience lens replacement. And since it’s a really cool technical fix, it’s worthy of the “Geek” tag.
I’m having my right eye operated on this Wednesday, September 21; the left eye will be done on October 18. In preparation for the surgery, I’ve just started eye drops three times a day: Vigamox (an antibiotic) and Nevanac (an anti-inflammatory). The pre-op tests took place on September 6, when they measured the interior and exterior geometry of my eyes using an ultrasound device; they’ll use these numbers to choose the right lenses for my replacements.
In peparation for the experience, I’ve been reading up on the subject and watching a number of videos. The best (lengthy) discussion of the subject is this lecture from UCSF:
For a quick presentation of the actual procedure, this video is good, though rather low-res:
One of the things I’m particularly intrigued by is how much difference I will experience in my vision. Yes, I know that my eyesight has been getting increasingly poor – my right eye is around 20/80 – but the deterioration has been gradual enough that I probably didn’t notice the changes. I’m really curious about how my color perception will shift. In some areas I’ve noticed the changes – increased glare during night driving, for instance – and I’m looking forward to improvements there. I just read an interesting piece by an ophthalmologist who himself had to have cataract surgery; as you might imagine, he was keen to document the experience carefully. (And it changed his professional outlook completely.)
Anyway, more and more of you will be going through this process over the next few years, so I’ll try to blog regularly about what it’s like.
Quote of the day: on proportionality
The amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of the euro, none of them were senior financial policymakers in any government, etc.
NoSQL at Yahoo!
One of my colleagues, P.P.S. Narayan (known to all as PPSN) is giving a talk next Thursday (September 22) on NoSQL storage services at Yahoo. It should be very instructive and entertaining. You can find out more here: Scaling Yahoo! – NoSQL in the Cloud – Database- Eventbrite.
More "Personal Incredulity"
Over at Camels with Hammers, Daniel demonstrated that the “Argument from Personal Incredulity” is not restricted to mysterians or theists. I tried to post this as a comment, but for some reason it wasn’t approved, so I’ll repeat it here:
Daniel wrote:
I share the suspicion that robots could not have an internal, subjective side of experience.
To which I responded:
Sounds like an argument from personal incredulity to me. Let’s unpack it a bit. Are you a dualist? If so, then you can certainly argue that there is some essential difference between a human brain and a robot brain; you just have the thorny question of explaining how it is causally efficacious. If not, then you have a different kind of hard problem: to explain why it is impossible to create a synthetic substrate which can function in all the functionally relevant ways that the spongy grey stuff in your skull does.
Now perhaps you are arguing that in practice based on currently available technology, such a thing is impossible. Even there, I suspect that you are indulging in a little species-chauvinism. We humans have a natural tendency to exaggerate the competence of our brain function. We actually observe, reason, remember, pattern-match, infer and deduce far less than we imagine we do, with much less accuracy or consistency, and we confabulate like crazy to fill in the gaps when this becomes apparent.
Introspection is simply a form of feedback loop: a process in which a part of a complex system monitors and reasons about the operations of the system itself. Such feedback loops occur all over nature – and engineering. (Check under the hood of your car.) They are fundamental to basic processes like homeostasis, learning, and troubleshooting. It is highly implausible that a sophisticated robot would not incorporate such design patterns.
Review: Ready Player One
Here’s my Amazon review of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”:
Simple Wonderful (five stars)
The 80s were an interesting decade: the first personal computers, the first video games (in arcades and in the home), the first music videos, and a string of wonderful movies that brought together teenage angst, over-the-top technology, exuberant fantasy, and epic quests. So what would seem more natural than to wrap up all of these themes into the ultimate epic video game quest of all time? What better distraction could we have from the dystopia of The Decline And Fall Of Just About Everything?
Read it. Just read it. I wish Douglas Adams was around to endorse it. And I hope you feel the same guilty pleasure that I experienced each time I worked out a puzzle before the protagonist had got there. (Isn’t being competitive what this is all about?)
And now I have to go and dust off my PS3 and kick some zombie butt….
Actually I have just acquired a PS3, but my game of choice is Soul Calibur IV. So rather than hacking zombies, I’ll be chasing sword-fighting maidens in skimpy clothing and High German knights in blood-stained armour…
What leads to the Argument From Personal Incredulity?
I just finished reading the slim account of a debate between Dan Dennett and Alvin Plantinga, entitled “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?”.
Dennett’s conclusion is straightforward:
Plantinga wanted to show… that science and religion are not just compatible: Science depends on theism to underwrite its epistemic self-confidence. […] [But] Our capacity to discover the facts, and to have good reasons for believing that we have done so, is explicable without appeal to inexplicable or irreducible genius, immaterial minds, or a divine helping hand. […] Let Plantinga, like Behe, try to show us the irreducible complexity in our minds that could not possibly have evolved (by genetic and cultural evolution). He will find, as Behe has, that his inability to imagine how this is possible is not the same as a proof that it is impossible. Richard Dawkins calls this the Argument from Personal Incredulity, and it is an obvious fallacy.
This fallacy — the Argument from Personal Incredulity – is one that has always fascinated me. Of course many (?most) people who say that they “can’t imagine how X could have happened” have probably never actually tried to imagine it: they have a prior commitment to a position that holds that it could not have done so, and that’s good enough for them. And in some cases they may lack the background to actually reason about the subject. But how about the others? What factors might underlie an honest, good-faith Argument from Personal Incredulity concerning the reality of evolution, from the origins of life to human consciousness?
It seems to me that there are a number of failures of imagination which, while individually innocuous, could have a cumulative effect. Let me list a few of them; I’m sure that you can think of others. Each of these items warrants a lengthy exposition, but for now let me simply summarize:
- Lack of appreciation of very big (and very small) numbers. The enormous age of the planet (143 Petaseconds). The vast number of cells in an organism – or on the planet. The short time needed for a chemical reaction to play out, or for a mutated gene to thrive or be extinguished.
- A tendency to think backwards, deterministically, all-or-nothing rather than forwards, incrementally, in parallel, with contingency. This builds on the large numbers involved: the entire planet (and indeed the universe) is full of experiments in selection, all proceeding in parallel, all interacting, and all subject to myriad contingencies.
- Lack of appreciation of how much can be accomplished by so little. To understand the power of complex systems, start with simple ones. Look at the range of capabilities of single-celled organisms, or artificial life systems. Now apply scale and parallelism to these simple components.
- Hubristic over-confidence in the capacity and ineffability of the human mind. Our brains are good at handling fragments of analysis, recognition, inference, and recollection; they’re also quite good at weaving together a story to fill in the gaps and fix up the mistakes. We “remember” things we haven’t seen, and “decide” to do things that have already started. (Philosophical arguments about mental capability – things like Searle’s “Chinese Room” and Jackson’s “Mary” – assume a total competence which is demonstrably at odds with the way the brain actually works.)
When an online store collapses under the load….
Like many people, I decided to buy an HP TouchPad last weekend. In my case it was mostly nostalgia: my first mobile wireless data device was an HP-200LX with a RAM Data Modem. But I digress. So last Sunday I went to Best Buy, and struck out. Fry’s ditto. So I came home and decided to try the HP online store. To my amazement, I was able to buy a 32GB TouchPad for $149.
Or so I thought.
That was August 21. On August 22, I returned to the HP site, and the entire online store had vanished. There was no record of my order, my login at a different storefront wasn’t accepted….
On August 24, after receiving a cryptic transactional email from HP I went back to the HP site. Now there was a link to a special page for customers who had bought over the weekend. I logged in, and saw a line item for my order, which was shown as having been placed on August 22. Clicking on the line item brought up detailed order page, which showed that the item had been ordered on August 24, was due to ship on August 24, with an estimated delivery date of… August 24:
Of course the shipping information was blank. But it gets better. At the bottom of the page there was a link to Line item detail. This brought up the following gem, showing the estimated delivery date as August 26!
It is now August 28. None of the information concerning my order has changed since August 24. And (obviously) I haven’t received my TouchPad.
Anyone care to guess when it might arrive? I’m not holding my breath….
UPDATE: This just gets better and better. I tried to ask HP about the status of the order using their email tool, and got the following error:
UPDATE #2: Sunday on Labor Day weekend seems like the perfect time to update the order status – and someone at HP did exactly that! Apparently it’s being delivered today! (I’m not holding my breath.) Here’s the status:
Getting the instant-on performance I expected out of Lion on my MBA
When Apple started working on 10.7 (Lion), I signed up for a developer account and installed every new developer build on my MacBook Air. (And then used it for production work, in flagrant disregard of Apple’s warnings.) When 10.7 was launched on the world, I was already running the release bits. And since then bunch of stuff I’m not supposed to talk about.
But there was a problem. Over the last few months, wake-from-sleep time was getting slower and slower. Reviewers were waxing lyrical about how an SSD MBA with Lion was “instant-on” when you opened the lid; for me it was 30-90 seconds. I wondered whether it was related to the fact that I run in 32-bit mode (I still have to use some brain-dead Cisco VPN drivers – and yes, I know about the workarounds, and no, they don’t apply to my situation.) But colleagues weren’t seeing those problems.
So yesterday I did a clean install. I backed up my stuff onto a USB drive; erased the SSD and reinstalled 10.6 (Snow Leopard) from the cute USB key that came with my MBA; brought 10.6 up to date with Software Update; installed the release version of 10.7 from the App Store; reinstalled Office 2011, iWork, OmniGraffle and all my other apps, and restored my home directory. Then I synced bookmarks, etc. via MobileMe, and applied the latest stuff I’m not allowed to talk about. Finally I flipped the system to boot in 32-bit mode and added in the accursed VPN crap.
And it all just worked. My MBA really is “instant-on” from sleep; when I open the lid, I see the password prompt before the lid is 45 degrees open. And the system feels much, much snappier. (And it was pretty snappy to start with.)
Recommended.
Since everyone seems to be blogging about Steve Jobs…
Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote in January, 2009 on how Steve affected my career:
Why am I a Mac user? During 1996 there were rumours that Sun was trying to buy Apple. While any talk of acquisition soon fizzled, contact continued. For most of that year, I was part of a secret team working to integrate the Sun and Apple technology portfolios. Sun was to give up making desktop computers, Apple would abandon its minuscule server business, Solaris would be used as the basis for OS X, and sales and channel strategies would be coordinated. I spent much of my time that year at Apple, working on the networking aspects of the deal. It all unravelled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the beginning of 1997; with the NeXT OS technology he had no need for Solaris. Shortly afterwards, Eric Schmidt left Sun to join Novell, before moving to Google a few years later. All I got was a T-shirt, and a PowerBook – but that was enough.
The Apple side of the proposed deal was initiated by Ellen Hancock (CTO) and Gil Amelio (CEO), both of whom were dumped by the Apple board as part of Steve’s return. Neither seemed the kind of person who understood the importance of design, and could have led Apple down the path towards the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. So in retrospect the Apple board got it exactly right. But the joint venture was fun while it lasted, and I got to work with some amazing Apple engineers: figuring out how to add AFP and Apple printing support into Solaris, and working on eliminating the last non-TCP based networking dependencies in Mac OS.