Schierer Space

I see in dots. Like a Seurat painting where the points keep moving… or the noise on a badly tuned television set. Turn your camera to the highest ISO setting and take a bunch of pictures in a row, flip between them at a hundred frames per second. Swirling eddies of random colored input.

No loss of clarity… ignoring my long diagnosed near-sightedness… no obvious increase in ‘floaters’ or patterns of any kind, just dots. Noise. Sparkling microscopic lights. and darks. but mostly both.

I can’t recall if they just appeared one day, or if they were always there and I simply started to observe them. You know, in that way you can look at something and it seems perfectly normal, but you never really see it, because you didn’t see the gorilla juggling in the background? Like when you take the perfect portrait and when you look at the image later, suddenly notice the signpost sticking out of their head. It’s perception and that’s trickier than sight.

It’s most obvious in low light, or looking at a solid color surface and when I’m standing still and thinking about what I see, or just thinking about not thinking about something else. It’s not particularly distracting to what I’m trying to see, or disruptive, until I happen to notice and then wonder how I could have possibly not notice the rest of the time. I’m sure they’re always there, but a ruler still looks like a ruler, and a water glass is a water glass, ‘k’s look like ‘k’s and ‘q’s look like ‘q’s. The results are still correct, the grey matter still results in words and objects and things to manipulate, as if it has always been this way… or perhaps the sensitivity is suddenly just a little too high.

I deal in matters of signal to noise ratio and detection thresholds and false alarm rates. That phenomenon where even something that couldn’t possibly be there can be detected as if it was. A few electrons or photons or sub-atomic quantized somethings happened to spin clockwise instead of counter-clockwise and a few hundred femtovolts became - at just the right moment - a few more femtovolts and trip some comparative circuitry into believing that nothing is something (or maybe if we lean the other way, something becomes nothing). Noise. Random chance combined with data means random data. The 3rd Law of Thermodynamics writ large… or perhaps just large enough. If the signal is high enough, bright enough, loud enough, the noise is irrelevant, almost unnoticeable. Take away the signal or make it dark and subtle enough and the noise is all you have. Flickering and changing, there but yet not there.

Like the dots. I’m not crazy, well at least not because of this, but sometimes I wonder if I see things that others don’t see or if I simply observe more. Hypochondriac or overly analytical, maybe both or neither. It’s impossible to say. Sit in a darkened room, and stare at a blank sheet of plain paper. Make sure it’s dark enough that the paper looks dark and not white. Not glossy, not flat, but just plain ordinary uniform paper. On second thought, don’t stare, just look at it, really look. Is it solid? Is it plain? When nothing should be changing, does it?

Maybe you’ll see in dots too.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Strange Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.