[Python-ideas] Proposal for default character representation

[Todd]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 3:26 PM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:

> One my supposition is that during the reading there is
> very intensive two-directional signalling between eye and
> brain. So generally you are correct, the eye is technically
> a camera attached to the brain and simply sends pictures
> at some frequency to the brain.
> But I would tend to think that it is not so simple actually.
> You probably have heard sometimes users who claim something like:
> "this text hurts my eyes"
> For example if you read non-antialiased text and with too
> high contrast, you'll notice that something is indeed going wrong
> with your eyes.
> This can happen probably because the brain starts to signal
> the eye control system "something is wrong, stop doing it"
> Since your eye cannot do anything with wrong contrast on
> your screen and you still need to continue reading, this
> happens again and again. This can cause indeed unwanted
> processes and overtiredness of muscles inside the eye.
>

The downards-projecting signals from the brain to the eye are heavily
studied.  In fact I have friends who specialize in studying those
connections specifically.  They simply don't behave the way you are
describing.  You are basing your claims on the superiority of certain sorts
of glyphs on conjecture about how the brain works, conjecture that goes
against what the evidence says about how the brain actually processes
visual information.  Yes, the quality of the glyphs can make a big
difference.  There is no indication, however, that the number of possible
glyphs can.

> And it also makes no sense that it would cause visual impairment, either.
> > Comparing glyphs is a higher-level task in the brain,
> > it has little to do with your eyes.
>
> You forget about that whith illegible font or wrong contrast
> for example you *do* need to do more concentrarion,
> This causes again your eye to try harder to adopt
> to the information you see, reread, which again
> affects your lens and eye movements.
>

I don't want to imply bad faith on your part, but you cut off an important
part of what I said: "The size of the glyphs can make a difference, but not
the number of available ones.  On the contrary, having more glyphs
increases the information density of text, reducing the amount of reading
you have to do to get the same information."  Badly-antialised text can be
a problem from that standpoint too.  But again, none of this has anything
whatsoever to do with the number of glyphs, which is your complaint.

Again, I don't want to imply bad faith, but the argument you are making now
is completely different than the argument I was addressing.  I don't
disagree that bad text quality or too much reading can hurt your eyes.  On
the contrary, I said explicitly that it can.  The claim of yours that I was
addressing is that having too many glyphs can hurt your eyes or brain,
which doesn't match with anything we know about how the eyes or brain work.
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