Interesting findings regarding dyslexia

Selfie as I wore my dyslexia t-shirt which reads (in French):sodilarity with the dyslexic

Today, the part of the Internet which I pay attention to was abuzz about the recent findings about “Left–right asymmetry of the Maxwell spot centroids in adults without and with dyslexia” published today in The Royal Society, and the work on a lamp that probably cancels or enhances the blue in question, to help override the anomaly (good luck with shining that light in digital media!) See the appendix for the article’s abstract.

I’ve had dyslexia all my life (duh, it’s not like it’s a virus), well before I knew what it was. And today I learned a new characterisation: “visual and phonological deficits“.

Testing

So I looked out a window at something in particular in the general brightness of the outside, for at least 10 seconds so that the image of that thing printed itself at the back of my retina. Then I looked away, closed my eyes and put my hands on them. While keeping my eyes closed, I removed a hand and covered my eye again then removed the other hand and covered my eye back. I did that for a bit, assessing which eye had the clearer retinal persistence. This is a technique to determine which is your dominant eye. Retinal persistence in my case was as clear in one eye as in the other. No surprise.

A decisive joke!

A pal I hang out with on IRC suddenly made a candid but decisive joke, “so you need to close one eye!” And I thought, why not? and I did.

I read the same bit of text I had been reading before and found the process of reading much much smoother. It was so incredible that I suspiciously chose text I wasn’t familiar with at all and again, found the process of reading with just one eye much faster and fluid.

Sensory handicap paradox

It is counter-intuitive, in case of a sensory handicap to narrow-down the sensory input, but in this case I was happily surprised. Similarly to when I discovered many years ago that in order to best depict in 2D on paper something I was looking at in 3D, all I needed to do was close an eye and draw.

I’m glad I work from home. Nobody will see me when I read while wearing the eye-patch a friend of mine gave me for Halloween years ago.

Appendix

Here is a quote of the abstract of the article Albert Le Floch and Guy Ropars from the University of Rennes published:

In human vision, the brain has to select one view of the world from our two eyes. However, the existence of a clear anatomical asymmetry providing an initial imbalance for normal neural development is still not understood. Using a so-called foveascope, we found that for a cohort of 30 normal adults, the two blue cone-free areas at the centre of the foveas are asymmetrical. The noise-stimulated afterimage dominant eye introduced here corresponds to the circular blue cone-free area, while the non-dominant eye corresponds to the diffuse and irregular elliptical outline. By contrast, we found that this asymmetry is absent or frustrated in a similar cohort of 30 adults with normal ocular status, but with dyslexia, i.e., with visual and phonological deficits. In this case, our results show that the two Maxwell centroid outlines are both circular but lead to an undetermined afterimage dominance with a coexistence of primary and mirror images. The interplay between the lack of asymmetry and the development in the neural maturation of the brain pathways suggests new implications in both fundamental and biomedical sciences.

Astuce peinture carreaux

Qui n’a pas pesté en repeignant ses carreaux muraux lorsque la peinture est chassée sur des zones recouvertes de restes de joint en silicone ?

Je ne sais pas vous, mais moi j’ai bien nettoyé ma surface au produit dégraissant, à l’anti-calcaire et à l’alcool, je l’ai grattée à la lame et je l’ai inspectée scrupuleusement. Alors quelles ne furent pas ma surprise et ma frustration de voir ma première couche de peinture blanche laquée chassée par endroits, en forme de points ou de traits, là où j’avais si fastidieusement nettoyé.

J’ai donc réfléchi à un petit hack et pris deux heures de retard planifié pour passer le lendemain des petits coups de stylo correcteur-blanc afin de remplir les zones non peintes, sachant fort bien pour en avoir fait l’expérience : ce qui ne se peint pas en première couche ne se peint pas. Point.

Puis seconde couche de peinture spéciale pour carrelage mural; nickel. On ne voit pas les raccords. Il faudra voir à l’usage comment ça vieillit.

Collage d'imagettes montrant la première couche de peinture chassée par endroits par du silicone, moi appliquant du tipp-ex pour combler, le travail achevé, et finalement, la seconde couche parfaite de peinture

Effing this, effing that

My friend Alexandre pointed me to an article by Uncle Bob, There are ladies present, in which I had a language-related epiphany:

[…] there was an f-bomb in every sentence. It was effing this and effing that and what the ef here and there and everywhere. […]

Until that time, it had never occurred to me that the adjective ‘effing’ took its origin from the f-word, ‘fucking’. But now that I do, it makes sense completely.

I may even use it, now that I understand –and own it, in a way. That will add an extra middle-strength layer to how I convey a feeling or state of mind, still keeping the f-word as last resort.

By the way, Uncle Bob’s article is one that I recommend; he shares how women in tech have thus far lived in perpetual inconsequence, mostly having no status, no respect, and no voice in their world.

I used to be thick in #semanticweb

I used to be thick in #semanticweb. But that was before.

That was before Alexandre (@bertails) started to explain, and Amy (@amyvdh) translated.

What’s a triple? Easy. It’s three URLs: subject (sky), predicate (has color), object (blue).
Now, what’s a quad? It’s a 4th URL that names the context.

I was kidding; I’m still obtuse to Semantic Web. But I’ve learned something!

Thanks, wonderful colleagues.