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| The latest batch of books rescued from life on the streets |
Well, it's finally here, that dreadful date that the Mayans predicted would see us all hung-over and squinting at a merciless sun - the oneth of the oneth of onety-oneth. What? Oh, very well - Twenty-baker's-dozen, the oneth of the oneth of 2013. Father Christmas's birthday on the 25th of last year saw me nicely stocked with re-homed books to read, thank you very much indeed. This happy band, these lucky few, have survived the spine-breakers, the corner-folders and the gravy-splashers and have now found their way into book heaven. A shelf space all of their own, lots of fresh bedding and the nearest to danger that they will face is a little tussle with the home-baked crusts of a midnight Marmite sandwich.
So far I have been around America in a Chevette, out to Mars, nearly into the Sun, through several critical battles with some quite odd Generals and through an alien portal to the centre of our galaxy.
I wear Hubble-varifocals. Like most of the artifacts around us today, the design is mindless and appalling. The lenses are upside down, that's the only way they are made. Some numpty ages ago made a chance or random snap decision and no-one to this day has questioned it or thought about form or function. To see close distances and look at objects right in front of me I must move my head up towards the horizon and the sky. To see long distances, things that are far away from me, I must move my head down towards my lap. With my head in the "neutral" position, looking somewhere through the middle of the lenses and without having my head either pressed into my chest or rolling down my back like some inebriated zombie everything about two metres away is in focus - good for none of the activities that consume 90% of the average day such as looking across a room at what the dog's just squeezed out, driving, boiling a kettle or reading a book.
When I'm under a camera they are even more useless.
It's not even possible to get varifocals that work from "side to side" - to see longer distances look to your right a little, for shorter distances look to your left, for everyday tasks look straight ahead because we've adjusted the optical effect according to need, not slavishly followed a steady curve. Even those would be better than these!
Mindless, thoughtless design makes my blood boil. Design something properly just once, build it to a high standard just once and it will work beautifully for ever after. Be lazy enough to sod the design stage once and a thing is a thing of excrutiating inconvenience a million times thence to a million people in a dozen different ways.
To read a book comfortably I have two choices. I can give the dog knock-out drops and then wedge the open book between her upturned buttocks on the floor two metres away, or I can take the Hubbles off my nose and read without - with the pages ten centimetres off the end of my schnoz. With larger books this entails swivelling my head from side to side to capture the whole of the page. If using the latter technique I must also squint through just one eye, since the prescription for one eye is very different to that for the other.
When using the up-turned dog's buttocks method I have to be barefoot so that I can turn the pages. If reading in bed without my specs I have to find my plate of sandwiches by touch, somewhere out there in the fuzzy void.
All of this might be avoided if only we humans occasionally didn't do things "the way they've always been done" or "the cheapest possible way" or "because up's up and down's down, innit, yeah". P-poor design is infuriating! Dyson did something brave by harnessing cyclones - and then he stuffed it into the common or garden age-old non-design the-way-we've-always-made-'em vacuum cleaner (and added p-poor engineering and p-poor build quality as jam on the cake). We've all embraced komputahs and what do we generally do with them? Nothing new, nothing revoutionary - we make them mimic paper documents and the postal service, the Box Brownie and, via the uniquitous cctv camera, the job's-worth nosey-parker bobby on the corner watching your every move. Nothing revolutionary, just what we used to do before but done faster.
As they say, if you have to put a sign on a door stating "Push" or "Pull" then the design of that door is a failure! Good design - great design - simply accommodates what is needed without constant fresh input. When we were hunting through the wilds of Surrey looking for something sabre-toothed to eat the shrubbery was moved out of our way without thought - how retrograde a step is it to surround ourselves with plate-glass doors in futuristic towers that only move one way and must be individually assessed and learned and consciously either pushed or pulled?
Brilliant design, absolutely revolutionary, brilliant design, does something entirely new. New - not just faster or more reliably or more cheaply or more often, but something new. Cars weren't revolutionary or brilliant - they are just an extension of the horse and cart which was an extension of the litter carried by slaves which was slightly better than stumbling around on foot. The Space Shuttle wasn't brilliant design - it was just a vehicle with a vector turned through ninety-degrees to the "horizontal" norm.
Everything we do is still just some form of runnin', jumpin', hitting things and shouting more loudly than the rest of our tribe. There really is nothing new under the Sun - but not because it's all been done before; because we move and think in tiny little safe steps built on the edge of the previous step.
For 2013 I will be continuing my quest. I want to have an original thought.
A new colour or sound, a brand-new concept, a fresh behaviour that is not built on a pyramid of old behaviours.
Before I die I want to think something truly new.
Now, if you'll please to excuse me, I'm off back to Mars and Mercury and Venus and touring with Bill Bryson and riding a motorbike (a horse by any other name) with Ewan McGregor and commiserating with Generals who lost wars by doing things that had always won them wars before and reading about robots who actually behave just like (surprise, surprise) human beings!
Future worlds where spectacle design is based upon what the spectacles will actually be used for rather than how spectacles have "always been made Sir".
Incidentally, that's why dogs always have those long back "feet" - so that when they are upside down holding a book between their buttocks their feet can be turned inwards to stop the pages slipping over. The tail is simply a furry extension of the familiar book-mark (although retrograde, since one should never slam a book shut on a dog's tail even with use of knock-out drops). It is, though, very difficult to give full attention to some weighty romance or classic space opera if the dog has flatulence. Most distracting, most distracting indeed.
Space - the final frontier - the future of mankind - darling, I love you - at last, I have conquered Europe - thwarrrrrrrrrrrrppppp-pop-pop-pop... (or however an extended dog-fart is properly indicated).
Splendid stuff anyway though. Chin-chin. Push-pull.
[Crosses eyes and tries hard once again to think a totally new thought.]
Addendum, courtesy of Mr Hippo on the lawn:
This absolutely says it all - and was "stolen" from Spreeblick.com.
The Kindle is brilliant design: it enables you to read all the books you like without chopping down the habitat of your hairy cousins. There's no point pretending to care about animals if you deforest their forests. Dogs are a special case - they only need trees to piss on.
ReplyDeleteEvolution is taking care of dogs; they have adapted to use car wheels instead of trees. Nature will adapt them over time to only pee on the wheels of white Audi and BMW vehicles. I had a dog once that would only poop on the passenger seat of Italian cars built any year after 1996.
DeleteI heartily agree with you about the variotronic glasses. I am sure they were introduced by the cabal that sells kit to Accident and Emergency units. With these glasses, I no longer walk down the stairs, I tumble head first down them. I no longer step over obstacles, I trip over them. My knees are as bashed and bruised as the average schoolboy's. I have failed every job interview since for appearing arrogant as I peer down my nose at the interviewer. My girlfriend no longer gazes into my eyes, she stares up my nostrils.
ReplyDeleteRegarding push pull doors:
http://www.spreeblick.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/schoolforthegifted.jpg
Varifocaloids are a classic case of someone making something without thinking how it's going to be used. My optician once described me as a "natural varifocal wearer". He eats through a straw now in a room with a night-light constantly burning.
DeleteI think I'm slowly developing some sort of echo-location based on stumbling into things and swearing. When I make my first trillion I'm going to have a bespoke pair made to my own specifications - I'll like as not look like a giant fly with crystal eyes (but happy).
If anyone called me a 'varifocal' I'd rip his bastard eyes out and leave him sipping sewage at the bottom of the river.
DeleteWas that last comment of mine like, 'ard enough?
DeleteWell, I'll make allowances in view of your being a big girlie wuss and an inveterate sipper of fine sherry. Just remember to keep the pinkie down when making threats of a cawncrete-overscoat nature ...
DeleteOh, I feel your pain! I tried vari-lenses once and they drove me nuts. When looking at a sheet of paper, I could only see an area the size of a grapefruit which meant waving the paper around or waving my head around. Fortunately I'm able to get by using reading glasses and removing them every time I look up. It's worth the inconvenience, but of course I don't have your challenges.
ReplyDeleteAnother badly designed instrument of inconvenience is the keyboard. The "Qwerty" makes absolutely no sense on a computer and should have been changed sixty years ago when typewriters went electric. It has been a thorn in our collective sides that can't be resolved.
I applaud your life-goal to think of something truly new. With your fiendishly active mind, you might just manage to do it! Rock on, my myopic friend!
The keyboard is a puzzle isn't it? It's like continuing to use reigns to steer a car just because that's the way it was always done!
DeleteWhen I was sixteen the optician took me to his front door and asked me how much I could read of the sign painted on the end of the house over the road - to me it was just a fuzzy white wall! I confess to once having gone back to town (Norwich) to collect new specs - and walked into entirely the wrong opticians... They were very nice about it and took me down the road to where I should have been!
I have three dogs all of various sizes...
ReplyDeleteThe Scottish terrier is ideal for situating an average paperback, whereas the female welsh terrier is the perfect "venue" for my iPad.
I need a large Labrador to pal my hello mags on now!
I should be extra-wary using them for any device that plugs in - this can get one awfully confused, and if it's a mains lead you never quite get the dog's hair back in place correctly ever again. Don't forget the knock-out drops, they are essential!
DeleteOh no.... I see amongst your books there is one in which I appear!!!
ReplyDeletep.s. See my posting entitled... As Others See Us.
DeleteAha! I shall bump it up the running order Sir!
DeleteVarifocal lenses are designed the way they are because hundreds of other designs have been tried and they are all worse. The current design is the best compromise available and as a general purpose tool does the job well enough for most people.
ReplyDeleteThey were not designed by idiots but by clever people who did their best to solve a really annoying problem and spent decades developing the technology. Before that you had to have two pairs, ie distance and reading glasses, or even three pairs if you wanted to see at the right distance for reading music or cutting your toenails. Or you could opt for bifocals but you still couldn't read music or cut your toenails with those so you still needed the middle-distance pair.
I suspect that a lot of people who have trouble with varifocals are wearing a cheap, old technology design of lenses, haven't been informed of their pros and cons or simply haven't been instructed how to use them effectively. As with anything, if you understand the limitations of something you are spending serious money on, you are less disappointed when it doesn't meet unrealistic expections.
However, other options are available. A decent optician could make a modified type of varifocal called a degressive lens which gives a different range of focal lengths. There is also an upside down varifocal or bifocal available which does give you the ability to see close objects above the centre of the lens.
Unfortunately all these lenses have their drawbacks and nobody has yet come up with the perfect solution, no matter how hard they try........except that......if you are still with me......the problem arises in the first place because the lens in a middle aged eye loses its flexibility and no longer changes focus. Hence you need glasses to do it for you. But some time ago the Americans (bless em) developed a flexible lens material for intraocular lenses used in cataract surgery. So you can have what is essentially a cataract operation in your fifties or sixties which removes your own inflexible lens and replaces it with a flexible one, restoring your eyesight to what it was in your forties. Problem solved !!
Sadly this is not available on the NHS and I can't see that ever happening but it's easily available privately for around £2,000 per eye, which is not so bad when you consider the cost of the umpteen pairs of glasses you have to buy before you fall off your perch. And it means that when you are in your seventies you will not have to face cataract surgery because it's already been done.
I hope this helps! (I am an optician who happened to stumble upon your blog only once and on the occasion when you were slagging off varifocals.....how spooky is that!)
Hello M. Anonymous-Optician, and welcome!
ReplyDeleteHopefully my cynical diatribe in re dodgy design hasn't upset your ophthalmic applecart too seriously. It's always a bit of a bugger when some oik such as myself measures the visible and public results some other's working life against what might have been, instead of what had to be; especially so when for the sake of mere prose they omit to ackowledge the very great and pragmatic good of a set of small telelscopes strapped to the schnoz. Without them I would be lost, quite literally. I said as much only the other day (to the dog, no-one else was listening) when I moved on (corporeally, not spiritually) after making my fortune printing door-signs reading "Push if you like" and "Pull if you will" and "Ha-ha - guessed incorrectly didn't you?".
I have to admit that the set of spectacles I am currently wearing were a cheap snip at some £500, give or take, but they are simply the latest in a long line of such, and I am quite adept at wearing them and squeezing some utility out of them. I do appreciate my spectacles and have made strenuous efforts over the years to patronise the local independent optician rather than the corporate chain, and I sometimes wonder if therein lay the seeds of my disappontment? Is there perhaps some third option that might have been sought, some bastion of the blazed technological trail where information about alternatives and more sneaky optical designs you now reveal would have been laid more readily on the table?
Surgery on the eyes I regard as the last of the last of the last of the "only when utterly necessary" options; you'll forgive the poor pun when I say that I see no way to justify exposing my highly-valued boggly, bloodshot eyeballs to hospital or clinic "superbugs" merely for the sake of vanity or convenience!
Idiots? I should have been much more specific. I agree that lenses are very clever things and those who administer them may be more so. Those who come up with frames - and the prices - and the slavish trends of round/square/rectagular/thin/thick/frameless/John_Lennon/Tortoiseshell fashion however, and those who allow there to be nothing else on offer except the prevailing current fashion in frames, remain idiots in my view. Simple idiots, but, I doubt, pure ones. Optical emporia in general stock nothing but that which sells most readily and most often for the most profit, thus indicating that they are plain businesses removed from the medical good done by the opticians et al locked in the darkened rear rooms, and optical emporia are thus liable for any and all criticism.
As a wordsmith still using the age-old "always done it that way" alphabet though, I should have taken my own advice, and invented some new way to be more specific and more clear; I appreciate the skills of the optician and the ophthalmic surgeon, I appreciate less the skills of his or her high street business partners.
I rescind, recant and deny all former connections to disparagements of the technical skills of [some, maybe most] opticians and ophthalmically inclined persons (but not of their businesses).
Design in general, of most things, almost all of the time, though, remains utterly dismal and mindless. That it ever shines brilliantly once in a while is pure serendipity, and when it does shine the corporations and politicians move in like vultures, cloaking the light with their wings.
Chin-chin!
Blimey Sir Oily, for the first time a sensible, enjoyably written and well informed comment on your blog. Sir Anonny Mouse the Opticalista has told me stuff I didn't know. Considering that my Rayban framed varifuckups cost me over $1600 (twice, I keep getting into the odd altercation), I think 2 grand a pop for new eyeballs is a snip! I realise that for the donor they were also a snip but you get my drift.
ReplyDeleteI do have some reservations about losing albeit failing bits of my aging carcass in favour of someone else's dead bits. Lord Winston, the scientist, has warned Mark Cahill, the recipient of Britain’s first hand transplant operation, that he might well be better off without it. What if my lenses come from a woman and send the wrong signals to my brain so that every time I see, with renewed clarity, a man in speedos on the beach here I suffer an embarrasing woody? That sort of indiscretion can be jolly difficult to laugh off.
Nevertheless, I am willing to give it a go so I do hope Sir Optimouse is reading this and can provide further advice. Perhaps he will advise me not to do both eyes at the same time but to only do one, revert to a monacle and do the second one later? Personally, I am the sort of chap who likes to get these things over and done with and would probably instruct them to swap the liver out at the same time as they were stuffing some precautionary stents in and the dentists were hammering in some replacement ivory. I might even find time for a decent haircut and a pint of real ale at the Flogged Peasant.
So please, Sir Opthalmic Rodent, having cast real pearls of well reasoned wisdom in such an unlikely place, don't abandon us now!
I am bloody serious, Sir Owl, my eyesight, or the lack of it, is wrecking my life. I can't even walk down the bloody street without falling into a bleeding pothole. I am in Angola, I never knew you could swap eyeball lenses. I can't shoot anymore; unless I have an anti-aircraft search light aimed at the page I can't read anymore; I dare not drive on public roads because I just know I am going to fail to see that kid running out between the cars. Four grand and I get my eyesight and my lifestyle back? Cheap as bloody chips.
Dear Doctor Anonymous, where do I sign? There is a direct flight from Luanda, Angola to London Heathrow twice a week. My club is near Marble Arch, where is your clinic? Do you take cash, by the way? Bit of a problem with HMRC, my club is discreet, prefer it if no-one else knew I was back in UK. Mum's the word, eh?
Indeed so, M. Hippo - upside down varifocals would probably solve 90% of my grouches while working, and looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes would no doubt assist you greatly as you tame Africa. Why have these options been mentioned not once in all of my fumbling through opticians after opticians?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing that for your lens transplant you would be headed best towards Eastern Europe and Russia ...
Maybe for me, with my next pair of specs I won't have to resort to the troop of focussing monkeys currently living under the velvet dark-cloth?
Please come back Mr Optician!
Would we be able to see him if he did? Hope he does, though. I have asked my brother to find out if the op is available in Germany, that's about as far east as I fancy going. You can imagine what communist eyeballs would be like; too many days paid holiday, working to rule, strikes, stoppages...
ReplyDeleteI have re read the good Doctor's article and surfed the interwebthingy and these lenses are artificial (Doh!). The Daily Mail ran an srticle http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-158628/Intraocular-spectacles-alternative-laser-surgery.html
ReplyDeletewhich explains the procedure.
I shall add being able to see again on the list of New Year's resolutions.
I'll stick with the Waterford Crystal paperweights strapped either side of my nose - far too squeamish for eye-eye-eye surgery!
DeleteEastern Europe seems to be the place to go for anything vaguely advanced such as teeth implants, eye surgery and a new Zil or Lada with no VIN plate.
I too wore contact lenses for years - sheer luxury. Sadly there was talk of unsuitability at which point I ditched them for the over-ear goblets. Haven't been able to wear decent sun-shades or walk into a warm building in winter ever since. Mind you, at least I _can_ see with the specs, for which I am truly grateful.