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[kisame12794]

Woah. Humans are weird. We got all this cool stuff already built in, but the body is blocking it. Wonder why that is?

[Max White]

I imagine a narrow range of vision has its advantages. While you can't see the entire spectrum, the bit that you can see is more contrasted, easier to pick things out.

[SalmonGod]

Too much information can be worse than too little information.

[kisame12794]

True, but we still have that functionality. That's what I'm wondering about. Why did we have it in the first place?

[scrdest]

True, but we still have that functionality. That's what I'm wondering about. Why did we have it in the first place?

Holdover from other mammals, I guess.

[alway]

True, but we still have that functionality. That's what I'm wondering about. Why did we have it in the first place?

Holdover from other mammals, I guess.

Or just because it happened to be there. Take note, it's a result of all 3 color detectors in the eye going off, rather than a specific detection of it. As such, it is, in a way, interfering with the normal vision spectrum, rather than augmenting it. Why the detectors go off in that spectrum is likely just random chance. Sure, you can 'see' ultraviolet, but it's also interfering with your ability to see the color spectrum which would otherwise be seen, as it would really just have the overall effect of upping brightness levels.

[Skyrunner]

Also apparently said UV eventually will destroy your retina.

[Max White]

Or just because it happened to be there. Take note, it's a result of all 3 color detectors in the eye going off, rather than a specific detection of it. As such, it is, in a way, interfering with the normal vision spectrum, rather than augmenting it. Why the detectors go off in that spectrum is likely just random chance. Sure, you can 'see' ultraviolet, but it's also interfering with your ability to see the color spectrum which would otherwise be seen, as it would really just have the overall effect of upping brightness levels.

In that way your brain isn't actually equip to see UV at all really, just the white distortion of all the other colors from UV radiation. It thinks it is looking at white! Scumbag brain... Or rather scumbag receptors lying to your brain.

[alway]

Also apparently said UV eventually will destroy your retina.

Hrm, yes, that could be a rather unfortunate side effect.

[Skyrunner]

Or just because it happened to be there. Take note, it's a result of all 3 color detectors in the eye going off, rather than a specific detection of it. As such, it is, in a way, interfering with the normal vision spectrum, rather than augmenting it. Why the detectors go off in that spectrum is likely just random chance. Sure, you can 'see' ultraviolet, but it's also interfering with your ability to see the color spectrum which would otherwise be seen, as it would really just have the overall effect of upping brightness levels.

In that way your brain isn't actually equip to see UV at all really, just the white distortion of all the other colors from UV radiation. It thinks it is looking at white! Scumbag brain... Or rather scumbag receptors lying to your brain.

They were only trying to do their best! You hater you! :I :I

[Max White]

Their best isn't good enough!

[Another]

So I found out today that the human brain is capable of sensing the ultraviolet spectrum. How do I know this? Because anybody who has the lens of their eye removed can see it.

By the way - in this very thread:

...

*One cool thing I learned along the way is that some people who had some types of intraocular lens implants (always because of cataract or other serious medical conditions) reported their perceptible spectrum widened slightly into near ultraviolet range. That has potential for some not insignificant practical applications as well as being totally compatible with the experiment to get near IR vision with special diet as linked earlier in this thread.

Some implants are specifically made to cut the spectrum at exactly the normal human limits. Others (especially early ones) - were not.

[alway]

So, on another front, materials science.
It's one of the most fundamental (and mostly silent) sources of the biggest revolutions in modern technology. However, it is now starting to be done en-masse using computational methods. This month's edition of Scientific American has a title article "The New Alchemists: How supercomputers are transforming innovation in materials design." In short, you can specify material properties you want, and use supercomputers to figure out what you could make that fits those properties.

A couple weeks ago, this also showed up: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57611919-92/supercomputing-simulation-employs-156000-amazon-processor-cores/

On Tuesday, the company announced a new record use of its technology: a simulation by Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California to see which of 205,000 organic compounds could be used for photovoltaic cells. The simulation drew upon the power of 156,314 processor cores at Amazon Web Services for 18 hours to test the chemicals with Schrodinger Materials Science software for computational chemistry, Cycle Computing said in a blog post.
The job cost $33,000. That might sound expensive, but it's cheap compared to purchasing hardware that sits idle most of the time or that can't perform at a comparable peak performance level. The job would have taken 264 years on a conventional computer, or 10.5 months on a 300-core in-house computing cluster that did nothing else, the company said.

Or in short, using cloud computing to do massive quantities of materials science on the cheap. This will quite likely have the effect of allowing for a pretty big increase in the rate of discovery of 'magic materials' like carbon nanotubes or graphene.

[SalmonGod]

Of course, there's also been various distributed computing science projects that anybody could donate cpu power to over the internet for years already.

[Tack]

Watching.

I'd be a cyborg. I feel that it's a necessary progression, and that sooner or later it will take the same properties as the gay/trans movement, with everyone saying it's ok to be rubut, and a few diehards protesting that humanity is important.
To be honest, as long as I don't have anything sentient in my head, I'm not too worried about it.