Newly Acquired Information

We are in the midst of our Vision conference, which has sucked up most of my time for the past week. This conference is unbelievable: 8 talks a day, each talk being 45min-1hr. Jesus Christ. And its all computational, so there's a lot of Bayesian formulas being integrated. My poster is in an hour (Open bar!), and that should be a hoot and a half.

I thought I would share the 3 most interesting tidbits of information I have learned through 24 hours of talks:

1. With every saccade (eye movement), vision is suppressed for 50ms. With the average number of saccades that one makes everyday, just looking around, that means that vision is suppressed for 90 minutes. Put another way, the average human is functionally blind for 90 minutes everyday without even knowing it (Daniel Wolpert).

2. The probability that a natural scene will be generated from a white noise distribution in an 8 bit 256x256 image is 1:10^179500. Put in context, the probability that an asteroid will hit the earth in the next year is 1:10^5 (David Field). I'm thinking of setting up a background program to just start randomly generating noise images... I want to see if I can entice Zaphod to show up in my lab.

3. The brain is complicated (George Sperling).

Its the small stuff really.