The chief scientist at my current job is a really nice guy named Tom Cornsweet who has spent a very long career studying human vision and developing tools to measure and analyze it. You can see his Wikipedia page here and a visual effect named after him called the Cornsweet Illusion here. A couple of days ago he lent me the seminal text book he wrote titled Visual Perception. The copyright date was 1970 and Tom says that, of course, technology and understanding have moved on since then, but it still provides a pretty good description of what we know about how people see. I am really looking forward to reading it. 
I work closely with Tom as part of a team that is implementing his “vision” of an instrument to help ophthalmologists and optometrists do their work better. It is a joy to work with him and I am learning a lot about how humans do the things I have spent my career trying to do inside computers.
Betty Blonde #173 – 03/16/2009
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