Dragos Rezeanu

lauren @NotABigJerk For everyone visiting their parents this week: LG tvs call it TrueMotion Roku/TCL calls it Action Smoothing Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus Sony calls it MotionFlow Panasonic calls it Intelligent Frame Creation Amazon Fire TVs call it Motion Processing 12/25/22

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

It's an unbalanced centrifuge rotor in a candy bar. Some sick freak is out there putting all the weight on one side of the rotor. Just horrifying these people are allowed to walk among us.

Please be sure to check your kid's candy VERY carefully.

I just found an unbalanced centrifuge in a Snickers bar.
🍬☠️💥

This only happens to you once

And what about Sam’s song about the guy who kicked the troll because the troll dug up his relative’s shinbone to chew on!? In a wry twist the guy either breaks his foot or has it eaten by the troll (conclusion unclear). Absolute banger! It’s like Peter Jackson didn’t even read the books…

a man in a suit and tie is sitting in front of a window with the words what a waste above him . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is sitting in front of a window with the words what a waste above him .

Reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in ~20yrs and I forgot how much of Fellowship is just songs. Feeling so cheated that the movie left out the song about the cat, the dog, and the cow that got super drunk one night, broke a fiddle, and scared the cow so bad it jumped over the moon…

We are pleased to announce that Webvision has been fully migrated to our new home at the University of Pittsburgh. www.webvision.pitt.edu

All traffic should not automatically be redirected from the old URLs, but please update your links.

Heads up: @pittophthalmology.bsky.social

That’s an EPS-12V 8-pin power connector (usually goes to the motherboard). The GPU wants more power than a single PCIe 8 pin will deliver on its own and it may have come with a splitter that takes the EPS connection and converts it to 2 PCIe 8-pin connections. support.exxactcorp.com/hc/en-us/art...

Windows is getting a better em dash keyboard shortcut. Rejoice, Windows and em dash fans! Microsoft is finally adding an improved Windows-wide keyboard shortcut for em dash and en dash. The change is part of the latest Windows 11 Dev channel builds, so it...

FINALLY!

Although knowing Microsoft this’ll also automatically invoke CoPilot for some godforsaken reason, just to juice the numbers… www.theverge.com/news/767551/...

YouTube video by Dr. Glaucomflecken The Root Cause Of Disease

“But is there a rootier cause? Only wellness influencers know for sure…” youtube.com/shorts/R-XO5...

Installing Ubuntu on a separate SSD so I can dual boot my PC… so this is what a slippery slope feels like

This… this is my Elysium #ColorimetryNerdHeaven

The local Safeway just started locking up their ice cream and I wanna take whatever moron executive thought this was a good idea and toss them casually into a wood chipper… this might seem extreme but I feel it’s justified. NEVER get between a stressed out grad student and their Ben & Jerry’s

If you put googly eyes on the Pillars of Creation you get muppets 😄😄

Literally the only macro on my phone and computer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s mapped to the word “shruggie” 😂

Miss You by Blink-182 or Waiting on the World to Change by John Mayer both immediately came to mind. Although I think You’re Beautiful by James Blunt was EVERYWHERE around that time too.

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?"

Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

Of course, it all kind of comes out in the wash because you adapt to the mean light level so what ends up mattering is how many "red" photons you absorb relative to other wavelengths, rather than the total number ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Aww, thanks Pam! That's super kind of you to say :D I'm so glad to hear it!

For cones, the probability of absorbing a photon is entirely based on the number of photons arriving and the spectral tuning of the cone type. So if you have the same number of "red" photons arriving and twice as many red cones, you'll absorb twice the photons and produce twice the summed response.

Definitely not sure how this would relate back to fluorescence, but that's an interesting point! Is the amount of fluorescence you see for a given fluorophore dependent on the spectral tuning of the fluorophore/probability of absorbing that photon, or on the energy of the incoming photon itself?

In each L/M cell type, the L and M opsins "compete" for which one gets expressed, and the resulting ratio seems to be based on subregions in each opsin gene that alter binding affinity for proteins involved in transcription regulation. Specific haplotypes make L or M the more likely fate.

There's actually a lot we know about that! Sticking to Red vs Green (L vs M), L and M cones themselves are the same cell type (not true of S), what makes them L or M is the opsin pigment they express. The L&M opsins are encoded by genes that are lined up in row on the long arm of the X chromosome...

But how else am I supposed to learn cool facts about the endoplasmic reticulum!? 😅

PS let me know if I misunderstood this! I think I maybe just repeated myself and totally missed the point you were making 😅

This is a big unknown for now. There’s some evidence that variation in what people perceive as pure green (a perfect cancellation of blue and yellow) may be impacted, but that’s still speculative. Like you said: the brain is just so good at creating a consistent model from really varied input!

I think I see what you mean! Ultimately the difference in photon energy doesn’t seem to have any effect on how “activated” a cone cell gets. They’ve basically just photon counters. In fact, cones are blind to the type of photon they just absorbed so calling them “red” cones is also a misnomer haha

A little bit of both! The brain is certainly involved, but parts of this illusion (and others like it: see Addelson’s checkerboard) appear to be the result of adaptation and edge detection mechanisms in the retina.

Thank you! Would love to see the same thing for some organelles!