A lady was wearing a black and white striped cardigan, and from close up I could see the separate stripes clearly, but when she walked away and got to about 20 metres distance from me the colours seemed to fuse together and go grey.

I'm assuming this is because the gaps between the stripes became too small for my eyes to define them.

So is this an unrecognised evolutionary advantage (being able to watch television the way we do doesn't count) or simply a fault with our eyes?

Many thanks,

Lana

My physics teacher claims that a very good slr camera is better than the human eye.

However I can't believe this is true. His argument was: If you stare at a single word in the centre of a page of a book, you wont be able to read the first word, whereas if you took a photograph you would quite easily be able to see every word.

Furthermore, if anything really was better than the human eye, how on earth would we be able to tell that it is better?

When I'm walking home from work at night, in the suburb, I can see rainbows around the sodium street lamps. They are usually best seen from about 10 metres away, and the rainbow's about a metre or ttwo out from the street lamp.

I've asked my friends, but nno one else can see these... is it normal?

I know this might appear to be a rediculous question, but it seems a little odd that a creature with compound eyes on the sides of it's head would have to turn its face directly towards an object to see it. I know this is an action that's generally associated with predators, in order to focus on pray, but the eyes of a mantis have neither the structure nor position of say, those of a wolf or a cat. And I never see other insects doing this, predators or otherwise.

Also, exactly why is it that a praying mantis' eyes darken when deprived of light, when again this is not something (at least as far as I have seen, and believe me, I spent the better part of my life catching and observing insects) that appears to be common in insects.

I'm short-sighted, and during a recent haircut realised that objects far behind me still looked blurry in the mirror. If the light is reflecting from the mirror (which wasn't far away), why is it blurry?

This may seem like a rediculous question, but i have noticed that it is much easier to know when a person is looking into your eyes than it is to know if they are looking at another similarly sized object. How is it that we know when a person is giving you eye contact?

I've heard from a few sorces that we can now input computational images into the eye. The sources didn't go into much detail on how to do this, but I am buessing that they figured out how visual images are processed through our Optical Nerve, and - after some lengthy reasearch - were able to imitate these electrical nerve pulses and hook up a wire directly into the part of the brain which processes images.

Is this right, and if so, then why does it work? Shouldn't the patient feel some sort of electrical current flowing throught their brain? Why does the patient's brain recieve the image as if it were a normal image from out eyes?

Do we all perceive color the same way ? for example do we all see the same color green or is the word green or red or blue just names to tag how we perceive those color. If I switched eyes with someone he might see the grass the same way as I perceive the sky but still call it green even though for me it would be blue.

The same goes for colorblind people (those unfortunate to mix up colors) if they were brought up seeing the grass as we would see it red. He would say green to everything red if we were able to see through his eyes. It would rely on education then.

Do I make sense ?

Specifically, how is the reading part of the lens held in the correct position?

Gino Trulli, Terracina, Italy