Comedy
Birds and Vision12.30.00: Birds are cool. I think about them often. As much as I am envious of their ability to fly, I can't really say that I trust them with their, uh, somewhat irresponsible distrubution of their droppings. Well, anyway, that's just a long way of saying that when I see a bird flying overhead, I usually try to watch it fly over me. I think birds are great, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't put it past one of them to try and hit me with last night's dinner, if you catch my drift.12.30.00: This may sound crazy, but I think that it is possible that the more intelligent you are, the better your vision is. Let us for a moment think of vision as something broader than strictly the physical ability of your eyes, and define it more abstractly as your ability to see the world around you. When you look around, the major factor is the physical ability of your eyes, but when you look at things from great distances, many times you rely on clues to try and figure out what you're looking at. If you are better able to recognize those clues, your vision will improve since you will be able to figure out what you are seeing. For example, say that two people were in Mexico and they were both standing in a parking lot looking at a sign just out of their comfortable field of vision (and let us also say that the physical ability of their eyes is similar). Say that the sign was written in Spanish, and that one of the two friends has taken Spanish and knows some vocabulary. The Spanish-speaking person, realizing that they are standing in a parking lot, and that there wasn't a car under that sign, could figure out that the sign says "parking strictly prohibited" by recognizing just one of those words. For the person who does not speak Spanish, they would have been able to see that they are in a parking lot, etc. but without knowing Spanish vocabulary would have had a hard time seeing the sign as anything more than a string of unrelated letters.For the Spanish-speaker, relying on their vocabulary they were able to "see" the sign by realizing the surrounding clues and by being able to recognize one of the words on the sign. In this case, they had better vision. Because one of them (in this case) was "more intelligent," their vision was better than the other's (in this case). For this purpose, intelligence can be defined as the ability to recognize clues unavailable to people who are less experienced. I think that this idea can be expanded to a larger sense as well. I think that assimilating clues may play an influencing role in vision, and may account for small differences in vision among different people.