The Alien Disclosure group has discovered an alien starchild living in China with amazing powers. They have proof. It’s on video.
Ooh, spooky. His eyes aren’t brown! I bet you didn’t know that blue eyes give you the power to see in the dark, did you?
The description of this kid is pretty silly, too.
In the Chinese city Dahua lives child of a new human race. Little Nong Yousui has blue eyes with a deep neon glow in the dark just like the cat’s eye effect.
NONG YOUSUI CAN SEE IN THE DARK AS MUCH AS WE CAN SEE IN THE LIGHT
Such eyes are a familiar sight even for the inhabitants of the Nordic lands. The boy can see in the dark as we can see in the light.
Yes. We Nordics are familiar with the neon glow of our eyes. We have to wear blindfolds to bed so that the glare doesn’t keep are partners awake. We also have a tapetum, just like a cat.
Let’s bring the Science to bear.
After his teacher shared these unusual abilities on the internet, suspicious reporters from Beijing decided to check out the information with specialists. They concluded from a variety of tests and experiments including DNA analysis and chromosonal defragmentation, none of which hurt the boy, that indeed he had ‘evolved’ genes. Little Nong is the first living man that can see in the dark.
According to some specialists, it is not a random change. Namely, this change isn’t a mutation consequence but more of an evolution consequence.
How do you tell a mutated gene from an evolved one?
I’d also like to try defragmenting my chromosomes, especially since they say it doesn’t hurt.
*twitch*
Don’t blue-eyed people tend to have slightly worse night vision than brown-eyed people? I know they have higher rates of various vision problems related to aging, but I’m not sure if that applies to kids.
Just make sure you’re plugged in before you start. It’s terrible when you go to sleep in the middle and wake up with a “gene not found” error.
My blue eyes are very good in the dark, but poor in bright light. Optometrist suggests this is due to low pigment levels in my irises, leading to long-term macular degeneration from bright sunlight, and excellent night vision. Anecdata, FWIW.
I should probably do a complete backup before I start.
So every advantageous anomaly is automatically a hybrid with aliens.
huh?
Good to know. *shrug*
To be fair the linked video vs. the linked text are of vastly different degrees of crap.
Rule Number One: “Do not act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling men!”
Apparently needs amending: “… or poopyhead”.
These weird stories about eyes just get cornea and cornea .. I bawl my eyes out.
And speaking of corneas, I have heard that people without them (after surgery) can see into the infra-red. I don’t know if “see” is quite the right word here.
Given the context, they probably meant to say “Such eyes are an unfamiliar sight even for [etc.]”
Not that it helps much.
What is this, 1995? Modern gene systems haven’t needed defragging in so long that my autocorrect dictionary doesn’t even include the word.
I was going to suggest putting Nong Yousui in a reality tv show with the girl born with eight appendages in India, and have it directed by Roy Andersson, but their respective villages are already exploiting them enough.
Grasshopper @8:
The way I heard it (from an internet friend—so, I couldn’t test his claim, though I knew him for nearly 20 years, most of them post-cataract surgery— who claimed it was the case for him) it was the ultraviolet, not the infrared; and it was not that he now perceived some things and some lights as being of “a new color” (as it might be, octarine), but more particularly that if he set up a triangular-crosssectioned glass prism in sunlight in the old-fashioned way (in his long and varied career he had once been a school teacher…) then the patch of light at the violet end of the spectrum extended further (i.e., was visible) for him than for people who still had their corneas.
I never asked him (and he never volunteered) whether the same effect happened with diffraction gratings. If and when I ever have that surgery, I will report back from the front.
Blue eyes can see in the dark? Perhaps that’s why my SO thinks I can get around the house at night without any lights on.
I’m not sure that eye color has much to do with quality of sight. It is more to do with methods to generate Vitamin D and sex appeal.
I can get you uv-sensitive contact lenses right here:
http://www.colorvuelens.com/default.asp?p=G&filteryr=&genre=8&alpha=&page=&source=&searchstr=&pid=1343&pname=Glow+Electric+Blue
I actually have a pair; they’re really cool for freaking people out.
These journalists act like they’ve never encountered a con before. Now, that is newsworthy!
numerobis@#10:
I thought that the onion’s genes were pretty fragged until that guy used Norton For Genes on them and optimized them down to a couple k.
I evolved red hair and all I got was an increased risk of skin cancer. :(
I feel cheated sometimes — I have to live with the terrible stigma of being German and I get boring mainstream human brown eyes and black hair, and terrible eyesight to boot. The least nature could do is give me night vision or something!
@leerudolph & Grasshopper:
Per Wikipedia:
Refs 27 & 28:
[27] M A Mainster (2006). “Violet and blue light blocking intraocular lenses: photoprotection versus photoreception”. British Journal of Ophthalmology. 90 (6): 784–792. doi:10.1136/bjo.2005.086553
[28] Hambling, David (29 May 2002). “Let the light shine in”. The Guardian.
@leerudolph, I had cataract surgery and yes, I can see the lower end of UV now as a novel color.
Apparently, the natural lens in the human eye filters out UV, synthetic lenses appear to not do so.
Here’s someone that discusses it at length.
http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystalens/ultra-violet-color-glow/
Before surgery, point sources of light had rays around them, like illustrations of stars and everything looked like I was seeing things through glass with Vaseline smeared over it. Nearly absent, the ability to see the color blue until the lens was removed.
I also see near-IR better than many, that was true before surgery and after. Those IR illuminators and lasers just are a bit brighter to me. To judge from conversations that I’ve had, it’s just part of the natural variability in human vision.
#20 wzrd1
<Dick mode> If IR illuminators are a bit brighter for you, congratulations. Brighter than what, may I ask?</Dick mode>
@Blattafrax, bright enough that I see them plainly. Not bright enough to be able to properly focus my eyes on fine objects.
So, I’ll notice them easier than most of my peers, but I’d never dream of trying to read with one. Think plain red LED, both are equally bright to me, just a slightly different color.
“Alien hybrid”. Yeah, sure, and let me guess, by pure chance these “aliens” are exactly like humans, only better in every imaginable aspect, and are going to bring us to the fifth dimension of enlightenment using their powers of crop circles?
I really hate it when these cranks use aliensdidit, not only do they perpetuate the worst SF memes, they turn them into a religion.
“Nong” – one of my favourite old Australian slang words. It’s a mild, affectionate insult. “You forgot the pies, ya big nong!”
Wow, I didn’t realize that I utilized an evolved superpower every time I took a late night stroll to the bathroom, as I can see in the dark well enough to navigate.
Of course, as a kid, I had real superpower, I could read by moonlight.
But, that was before my chromosomes were fragmented or something.
Damn, but I miss the days back when the press actually did a little fact checking! Now, the press merely uses the stupor power of repeating what they’re told.
Thus:
I think that they need to find new “specialists”. Perhaps, finding competent ones would be a good start.
wzrd1:
If you can see, it ain’t dark; it’s merely dim. Duh.
You were around before schlock publications were around? Heh.
I once had a walk on a hill seeing only by starlight; it was otherwise pitch black. Took my eyes about 20-30 mins to acclimate to the dark. Weird and very thrilling experience. (Oh, and yes: I tripped over a few things.)
I have really good low-light vision. Turn off a light in a room at night and as long as there’s a smidge of light coming from somewhere, my eyes adjust within just a couple seconds to the darkness. My poor boyfriend, on the other hand, usually takes 60 to 90 seconds before he can navigate his way to the bed. I’ve always assumed I must have a LOT more rods in my eyes than he does.
But what about the “half human and half bat” Bat Boy? Surely he sees — well, sonars — in the dark.
Marcus Ranum, I want contact lenses that make my eyes glow red!
By the way, Nong was probbly just bitten by a radioactive spider.
According to the subtitles the father said, “Two months after he was born I was told that his eyes were different…”
He needed someone else to tell him! Obviously not the most observant father on the planet.
The premise violates basic physics. If there is NO optical light (350-650nm) then there is virtually no UV or near-IR light. The only thing left is thermal IR, which is so long-wavelength that his resolution would be about one pixel.
When I hear crap like this, I think, ‘what’s the mechanism?’ Without a mechanism, I’m very skeptical, and none is given here. I think of N-rays, which only certain people could see in a completely darkened room. But when the focussing optics were removed (in the dark), they could still see them!
Of course, he might not be an Alien Hybrid™, he might just have been born with scotopic vision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_vision
A well documented vision difference. Or, am I just trying to cover up for Them
@wcorvi #32, poppycock! There’s still the cosmic microwave background radiation, cosmic rays and oh wait… We can’t see those either.
As a child, I could read a paperback book my moonlight. Now, I can still see quite well in the dark, but nowhere near as well as then. But then, I have both lattice degeneration, one cataract and the other eye has posterior lens capsule opacification (I have a referral to have that taken care of).
With the eye with the IOL, I can see long wave UV reasonably well (a fairly common occurrence, as many IOL’s doing block UV, but the natural lens does), both eyes can see near-IR illuminators as a deep red, about as bright as a regular red LED. If I were to make a guess, I suspect the UV is phosphorescence driven, due to some effects that suggest it.
Human vision actually has a wide variation, people literally will see different “shades” of white. There are actually reference works available that discuss that fact and to adjust white balance on televisions to the customer’s vision, not that of the serviceman’s vision.
@grumpy #31, yeah, I saw that and thought to myself, “*Seriously*, you didn’t notice the eye color of your own child?!”.
wzrd1:
That’s an amusing conceit.
(Does anyone adjust reality to reflect different people’s perception?)
PS
Actually, the evidence goes the other way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena
What conceit?
http://www.tweakguides.com/HDTV_14.html
This is a known adjustment that goes all the way back to the earliest color televisions.
wzrd1, heh. Way to miss my point.
Consider person A and person B looking out the window. The view is the same for both of them, right? They might perceive what they see differently (in terms of colour), but the input to their eyes is the same.
I quote from your link’s content: “In reality, some people will not like an accurate image for a range of reasons. This depends in large part on what that person has been conditioned to seeing. More often than not, the average person will be used to oversaturated colors, and will prefer cooler rather than warmer color temperatures. Thus when their TV is calibrated to the correct Rec. 709 Standard, whites will appear slightly yellowish to their eyes, and colors may seem muted.”
It’s not about what people see, it’s about what they prefer.
@John, let’s try a little experiment. Get a white sheet of paper, take it out in daylight. Examine it with one eye at a time covered.
The majority of people tend to have slightly different color registration with each eye. The brain mixes and averages it together. That’s in part due to minor differences within each eye, in part due to age related effects in each lens.
There is an excellent graphic on age relate lens changes on this page:
http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystalens/
Just search for ‘The human crystalline lens at various ages from Sidney Lerman’s “Radiant Energy and the Eye”‘.
Proteins don’t break down on a precise schedule in the lens, they’re largely random in rate, injuries, even how much UV each eye is exposed to help keep it quite random.
wzrd1:
Non sequitur.
(You’re flailing)
Ah, so I provide citations and imagery that shows visual perception differences by age and that’s flailing.
Indeed, did you try the paper experiment that I suggested?
wzrd1, so, you claim that because people perceive shades of white differently, TVs must be adjusted for correct perception and then cite a reference which says they actually adjust for preference, and when I note that, you claim that people have slightly different colour registration with each eye.
(What happens with households with more than one inhabitant?)
—
We’ve come a long way from a story of a child with glowing blue eyes who sees in the dark, no?
@John Morales, we’ve merely wandered off of the side of the lane a little. What always happens in households with more than one inhabitant? People compromise.
As for glowing eyes, one would have thought that the glowing property would have been apparent in the video, which it was not. Nary a hint of a human with a tapetum lucidum.
[utterly OT]
wzrd1:
Heh. More like debouched orthogonally.
(A known habit of yours)
But fair enough. You don’t think your claim about different colour registration with each eye is a non sequitur (aka irrelevance) to your purported justification for TV colour adjustment (never mind to the OP), but you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge that such adjustment is not about accuracy of representation, but rather about personal preferences (contrary to your adduced reference).
Duh — that was (sarcastically) noted in the OP. What exactly was your contribution?
(Oh yeah, that you can see can still see quite well in the dark, and that TVs need adjusting)
@John Morales,
Is it not readily apparent that with two differently sensing organs, each with their own “opinion” on what white is, different people would also perceive what white is would not also be different?
Indeed, what counts as dark is also entirely subjective. What is dark to an 80 year old may very well be reasonably well lit for a 10 year old. One’s range of color vision can be different than one’s neighbor, both due to age of lens, different expressions of cone cell numbers and even the coding for rhodopsins and other proteins in the visual processing system.
If the story were done correctly, quantitative measurements should have been taken, not vague mentions of eye color (which, save in the case of albinos, has nothing whatsoever to do with sensitivity to light).
wzrd1:
It’s not a logical entailment, no. But, even were it so, it would not sustain your claim that it necessitates colour adjustment for TVs, unlike windows.
Heh. Sure — dark and lightless are not synonymous, and different people have different degrees of vision in dim conditions.
What do you imagine you’re disputing? (I refer you to my #26.)
Sure; if the story had been “done correctly”, it would not have been bullshit.
I certainly have not disputed that; why do you bring it up as a retort?
(Your mastery of irrelevance is not in dispute)
—
So, tell me more about how you can see infrared and can see in the dark (even though you’ve lost your superpower) and how differential colour perception by eye justifies TV colour adjustment, the which is necessary because people perceive shades of white differently
(Truly a fascinating subject, and most relevant!)
@John Morales, my apologies, got caught up with work things, then my “weekend”.
So, we don’t adjust white balance to what a customer perceives as white, we tell a customer what white looks like and label that customer satisfied.
As I said, white balance adjustment goes back to vacuum tube color televisions. Trying to redefine things now denies history. I have a problem with denial of history.
As to my perception of the IR illuminator on my cameras/night vision device, it appears maroon, about as bright as a red LED. Two bands are common in near-IR band LED’s, 10 nm longer wavelength isn’t visible to me. As I said, normal range of vision is variable by a bit.
As for seeing in the dark, dark is a relative term. My cat sees better than I do in the dark, I see better than my wife in the dark, Helen Keller saw equally well as all in the dark.
The reality is, true dark isn’t easily obtainable, dim enough to process film is far more easily obtainable, but most couldn’t tell the difference between lab dark and a significantly dim room.
Personally, I like enough light leaking in to be able to not require a night light. That said, as I work midnight shift, it’s a challenge to get that generously dim.
Needless to say, when my wife left the door open to the solarium this “weekend” (for me), my eventual response to such visual stimuli wasn’t very nice. Something about a door sexually reproducing and the word please and requesting the closure of the door.
OK, maybe not quite that abrupt. ;)
But, we both realized what I was thinking. Just as well, considering how sheepish she looked when she realized her gaffe, it’s as well that I didn’t go Patton on her.
That permitted me to continue my 18 hour power nap. One eventually has to pay one’s sleep debt…