You might wonder how an Objectivist could hate a place where people have freedoms they don’t have elsewhere. I certainly don’t object to the laxity of social laws and regulations that people enjoy there. Adults should have the right to gamble or pay for sex, if they want to. What I object to is the cultural normalization of Las Vegas. It brings out the worst in people, and its effects are no longer confined to the Mojave desert.

From the first time I heard about it, I hated the idea of Las Vegas. Then I bent over backwards to try to accept it — if that’s what people want, good for them, let them have it. After attending a seminar there, I have gone back to hating it. It took seeing that wretched place up close to make me realize that Las Vegas may seem okay in theory, but is horrible in practice.

Las Vegas somehow extended its ugly vibe across thousands of miles to the plane I was on before I even arrived. Such is the awful power of the place. While I was waiting to board my flight out of Cleveland, the Continental people announced that they needed volunteers to be bumped off the flight. Nobody offered himself, despite several increasingly pleading announcements. Then they sweetened the deal: they would give you a $350 travel voucher, you’d be put up in a hotel tonight, get dinner and breakfast, and travel first-class to Vegas first thing in the morning. I was at the counter in about two seconds.

What ended up happening is that they didn’t need me after all. So the ticket lady called me up and gave me a certificate for a free drink to thank me for volunteering.

Now, I have only flown commercially one time before the Las Vegas trip, and before that first flight on an airline, I had already been a pilot for five years. I was (and still am) not used to airline protocol, because I have always been the pilot-in-command of my own plane. I never had to wait in a security line, never had to have my stuff rifled through, never had to worry about being stuck in the middle seat, never had to refrain from bringing on board anything I wanted — including sharp things and firearms.

So when the drink cart came by, I held out my coupon and asked for a glass of milk. Because not only do I not drink alcohol and never have, but I was under the impression that anything off that little cart cost money. The airlines are charging for everything these days, right?

Well, the stewardess smiled and told me politely that I could have the milk and wouldn’t even have to give up my coupon. Which was great. But the guy next to me burst out laughing when he heard my order! He could barely contain himself. The stewardess admonished him to “be nice” and wheeled the cart to the next row. I asked the guy what was so funny about all this. “You gave up a chance for a FREE DRINK? What planet are you from?” he said.

I guess he never thought that I could value other things more than getting soused while I’m speeding through the air in a big metal tube, as per tradition. We’re going to this wonderland offering up bacchanalia, he was saying in effect, and if you don’t take it, you’re weird.

I was going to give away my drink coupon if I didn’t use it, but I flushed it down the vacu-toilet instead. Whoosh! I just saved someone a few brain cells.

Getting out of the airport was a nightmare. My plane landed shortly before 10 pm. I walked into the hotel lobby at 12:30 am.

There were so… many… people. Everywhere. I had to wait in a big amorphous blob of people just to get on a tram to get to the main terminal. Then, I had to wait in a huge line for a taxi. By the time I got to the hotel, it had been two and a half hours. And I didn’t even have any checked baggage to wait for.

Guess how long it took to check in? Forty-five minutes. That’s right. The check-in line was forty-five minutes long at 12:30 am.

I reserved and paid extra for a room on a high floor so I could be away from the hubbub. They told me that they didn’t have the room I reserved. Whatever. I’m tired, just give me a room, as long as it’s non-smoking. The clerk said it was, smiled and handed over my key.

Not only had the room been smoked in, but it was located on the third floor, above a nightclub or something where the loud music rattled any hotel furnishings that weren’t bolted down.

I tried to ignore it and sleep. I didn’t want to be irate at 1:30 in the morning. But I couldn’t help myself.

It took more than fifteen minutes just to get through to the front desk. I explained that I deserved to have the room I reserved. I complained that I wasn’t in Vegas to party but to attend a seminar. I complained to whatever uncaring functionary they put on the phone until I was told to go to the front desk to pick up my new room key.

By the way, a manager told me that none of their rooms are non-smoking, no matter what their website said. Their rooms are “smoking optional”. What spin! Why isn’t she working for the President?

I had to wait half an hour to pick up that room key. At 2 am there was still a monster of a line at the front desk (which should really be called the back desk, because you have to walk through the damn casino to get there). And the room I ended up in? It was exactly the kind of room I had reserved in the first place. Which the liars told me they had run out of.

The next morning I woke up, took the wimpiest, lowest low-flow shower I’ve ever had, and headed for the monorail station. Some of the same gamblers were still there where I remembered them, in situ. You can’t really say they were merely seated. I think they grow out of damp casino floors and creep up the rungs of those high chairs and attach themselves like vines.

I made it to the Monorail station. Guess what? It was closed. I was a half-hour early. And they call Vegas the 24-hour city!

A brief interlude here. The Monorail was the one part of Las Vegas I actually liked. I am a huge transportation nut and a fan of futurism. I am the proud owner of a Disney World Monorail Co-Pilot’s License (signed by Mickey Mouse!) and I can’t tell you how many times I have watched Walt Disney’s last film, where he lays out what were his real plans for all that property in Florida. EPCOT was going to be a futuristic city where real people lived, not a warmed-over World’s Fair. Also, I was pleased to see monorail switch track at work for the first time in Las Vegas.

Back to the pain and suffering. On my second night, it took several phone calls and at least two members of the security staff to calm down the drunken revelers keeping me up at 3 am. They say that Vegas isn’t just for partying, but also for conventions and even families. Really? The party atmosphere permeated everything. Even if that’s not what you’re about, it’s hard to ignore. And everywhere you go, someone wants to hustle you or lie to you.

It’s interesting to me that when you create a playground for adults where they can really let loose and do what they want, most of them get right down to the business of smoking, drinking, gambling, and dabbling in promiscuity. It’s as if every vice is also somehow the epitome of the human experience. I just don’t get it. “We’re here in Las Vegas! Let’s have a great time by doing all the worst things!”

I’ll relate just one more story, because everything else in Vegas had the same tinge of rottenness to it. I ate my breakfast at the same hotel buffet every morning. It was described as one of the better ones in town. The first morning, I paid my money and they gave me a ticket and I waited for a seat. The second morning, before I could take my ticket, the lady plunked a little blue bottle on top of it. I cocked my head and said, “What?”

“It comes with the meal,” she said. It was alcohol. With breakfast.

Bewildered, I told her that she could have it, and she snatched it away. “Are you sure you’re 21?” she asked. This might have been a genuine question, because I have a youthful appearance. But it also reveals the tacit assumption around here that if you refuse to participate in numbing your brain, you must be weird — or underage.

On the flight home, I got stuck in a row where two frat boys yammered on for hours about why the Orioles sucked so much but the Pirates were okay, maybe, but why do they think that blah blah blah is worth $20 million and blah blah blah the Yankees are Satan incarnate… No surprise there. A city with artificial architecture, artificial values, and artificial boobs attracts artificial people. Yeah, I realize I was on the flight too. But I felt out of place the whole time, even among my plane-mates.

So what’s my beef with Las Vegas? I had a bad trip, sure, but why not live and let live? Some people enjoy the place, so shouldn’t I lay off them?

No way. Having set foot in that dump, I now see what it’s really about.

Las Vegas is about sickness and lying. Lying to oneself. I tried to convince myself that gambling, like anything else, is a legitimate activity that consenting adults can engage in.

No, it is not. It is depraved. Do you know what great lengths we go to to portray gambling as a normal activity? They want you to believe that it’s just fun, fun, fun for adults who play responsibly. It is incredibly dishonest. People are plied with alcohol, which maybe casinos couldn’t even function without, to make the wallet surgery painless. Everywhere you look is a new titillation. Blinking lights, blinking machines, blinking boobs. It is overwhelmingly clear that casinos are designed to suppress the normal, rational mental functioning of a human being. Gambling is not fun, it is not letting loose. It is not “gaming.” People who gamble are not “players” or “gamers” having fun. They are zombies pissing away their paychecks and nothing more.

Gambling is not a productive activity. Now, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in unproductive activities simply for pleasure, as long as it’s not the sole purpose of your life. But gambling is different. There is always the hope of making money by it. No matter how much a gambler swears up and down that he’s just out there having “fun”, you know if there wasn’t the chance of a big payoff, they wouldn’t be sweating in the desert. If you think that I’m wrong and that you yourself can enjoy gambling rationally and responsibly, then let me ask you: would you go spend $100 or $500 or $5000 at a casino if you knew in advance that you would never win, not even once on the way down to zero? Of course not! What the hell kind of fun is that? The allure of gambling is the irrational hope of beating the odds and getting lucky in a system that is plainly stacked against you. You’d be better off taking whatever you want to spend in Las Vegas and doing random stock picking. Or buying some crap property. Or even investing in a friend’s restaurant. Trying to get rich any of those other ways requires you do research and stay on top of the markets, find something useful to do with your real estate, or learn a tough business. Success in those fields does not involve luck. It does not involve hoping for unearned, unworked for riches. It may be risky, but it requires thought and action. Gambling requires nothing but a warm body and stupid hope.

The spirit of Las Vegas is no longer confined to Clark County, Nevada. Decades ago, decent people frowned upon the debauchery in that little desert town. Gambling was a disreputable activity done on the margins of society, operated by gangsters. In the seventies and eighties, the State Lotteries oozed out of our legislatures. Then in the nineties, the normalization of gambling really picked up steam as Indian casinos opened in almost every state. No longer do you have to travel all the way to Vegas to get wasted and go broke. Now you can do it at home! Vegas itself has mushroomed into a huge city supported by what is now a huge industry, a far cry from Bugsy Siegel’s lame attempt at running a legitimate business in a practically uninhabitable place.

Since gambling has been normalized in America, so has its ethos: that you can, in fact, get something for nothing. Of course it’s a lie, because if you really could get something for nothing, every casino would go bankrupt. It’s a lie that people like to believe, and the State actually encourages because it brings in extra tax revenue. Those in power believe it themselves and now we have a government operating on the same principle as Las Vegas. We’re spending massive amounts of money we don’t have now and don’t have a chance in hell of getting in the future to placate voters just until the next election cycle. California or Illinois or one of the many desperate, bankrupt States recently borrowed against 20 years worth of parking meter revenue to pay for just one year’s worth of some piddling social program. And when next year comes, who knows if they’ll still have any resources to exhaust? Sacrificing the long-term to the short term, and the dream of effortless riches — the spirit of Las Vegas is now the American M.O. The Strip has descended to Main Street.

As destructive and irrational as it is, the government has no right to ban or regulate gambling, except where it crosses the line into fraud (and I have to wonder, could a casino be an inherently fraudulent institution, like a ponzi scheme?) Normal society should look down upon gambling, and it should be relegated once again to the margins of society by custom. It will never go away, and we’d be fooling ourselves to think that since it will never go away, we should embrace and extend Las Vegas, like the Romans co-opting Christianity.

If you still don’t understand why I hate Las Vegas, let me leave you with a scene I witnessed on the last day of my trip. A mother emerges from the dark enclave of a smoky casino floor, the gigantic blank box called the MGM Grand, with two small children clutching her hands. As they step around a drunkard who has collapsed onto the pavement, a prostitution service shoves a catalog of call girls in their faces. You tell me if this is what humanity should aspire to.

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1. Outdated Words

It has been 50 days since my last post on my vision experiments. For the horrible lack of updates, I can blame my preoccupation with iPhone development during the last two months (look here if you’re curious). I plan to combine apps and blogging more harmoniously in the future. Also, I always figured that any vision changes I might experience would come gradually. If I blogged about my vision every single day for months or years, the posts would mostly be the same: “Stuff is blurry. Is it getting better? Boy do I hope so.”

I have continued to live mostly without glasses, and mostly happily at that. What’s unfortunate is that I have to stare at a glowing rectangle to accomplish all of my work. This glowing rectangle, in the form of various iMacs, PowerBooks, and Power Macs over the years, is the actual cause of the near-point stress that supposedly made my world fuzzy. That and books. It makes no difference whether the stressor is paper or glass; habitually seeing at near distances causes adaptation to near vision. The glasses only accelerated the worsening. According to the theory, anyway.

Nearly every kind of mental work requires seeing or manipulating little symbols within arm’s reach. I suppose if I threw away the computer and chose a career of, say, outdoor work, my vision might improve and stay that way for awhile. But my brain would be unhappy. Giving up the intellectual world is not an option. I’m just trying to maintain good, natural vision while doing the mental work I want and need to do.

As an aside, I think that to the extent that computers are blamed for accelerating myopia in the recent past, it is due to the length of time one can comfortably spend using them. I had several days of working from 5 am until 9 pm on iPhone apps. I was completely enraptured and would have gone on forever if I didn’t have to sleep and eat. Books are static and are mostly about consuming ideas rather than creating them. While I’m sure people used to read from dawn until dusk — I’ve done it myself — the book experience doesn’t compare to the variety and diversity of things you can both consume and create on a computer. Computers subsume everything books do and add so many more levels, and therefore invite longer periods of use.

Luckily, the path that led me into perdition can lead me out.

If near point stress gradually caused my nearsightedness, then the opposite should correct it. Ideally, I would put my eyes in an environment where they are encouraged to focus a little farther than they are used to, day after day.

The problem is that the world is so fuzzy that if I look at a tree in the distance, I can make no effort to focus on it. It’s not even possible. So if I take off my glasses and just look around — what they call relaxation therapy — my eyes might not get any worse, but they probably won’t get any better. My eyes don’t feel the slightest stress to focus on a blurry object 100 feet away.

They do feel stress when viewing the same computer screen at a distance just a little farther than I’m used to. So this is what I do to actively engage my eyes in focusing at farther and farther distances: instead of looking at the horizon like I’d like to, I’m looking at a computer screen that has been slightly blurred because I’m sitting a little father from it. It makes sense that my goal of someday viewing the big world out there with perfect clarity should start by moving the computer screen just an inch farther from my eyes. An object near the horizon is so highly blurred that it’s impossible for my eyes to resolve it, but when I view a computer screen positioned just outside of my short range of sharp vision, I can actually feel the effort that my eyes make to focus on it.

We’ll see if there is any improvement when I have my eye exam later this summer.

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1. Unglassed – Day 22
2. Unglassed – Day 1
3. Unglassed – Day 12

Click the chart to embiggen.

The dates I chose for the introduction of the various foods are fairly accurate. In each case, I chose the time when the popularity of the food seemed to explode, even if it was available in some form before. The disease trend line is just an educated guess based on my reading of Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Why would I make a chart based upon a guess? Well, the purpose of the chart is to illustrate what I and other paleo eaters actually think about the relationships among food, disease, and history. The rate of disease as shown in my chart is a depiction of what we think has actually occurred. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to back it up. If anyone can point me to a source of better numbers for the per capita rates of diseases of civilization, I will gladly substitute it for my guess. I suspect it won’t look much different.

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1. Quitting Sugar
2. A Defense of Breezewood, PA
3. Who Does Your Thinking?

Inflation is a destroyer of both values and justice. The people who were prudent with their money and saved it for the future see its value eroded or erased. Those who took on massive debt, far more than they could ever hope to pay back, benefit by paying that debt back with cheaper and cheaper currency as inflation marches on. The benefit is all imaginary, though, because such a grossly immoral scheme as inflating a currency can never be sustained. The people dependent upon the government handouts that are funded by inflation and debt never stop asking for more. Politicians never stop buying votes, either, even if they have to invent massive amounts of money to do it. Eventually, the whole thing blows up.

When a fiat currency implodes, everybody is hurt financially. In the best circumstances, the perpetrators responsible for the mess get punished, meaning, the politicians and social experimenters and intellectuals who championed inflationary monetary policy. You can’t count on it happening, though. So you have to do what you can to prevent yourself from becoming one of their victims.

Protecting yourself from inflation simply means investing your money in something that has real value and is not imaginary, so Federal Reserve Notes are out of the question. Gold and silver are popular anti-inflation investments, but almost anything not backed by the full faith and credit of our bankrupt government will do.

As I write this, we’re experiencing moderate inflation in the United States, as we have pretty much continuously since the introduction of fiat currency in 1913. It’s about to get a lot worse because of the ginormous amounts of spending recently undertaken by our cancerous Federal government. There is now a window of opportunity to beat them at their own game, risk-free. If we stay on the course we’re on (and we’ve been on it for almost a century), the window will close sometime in the future.

I made the claim that you can go spend a certain amount of money anywhere in America today and receive double the value in return. Doesn’t matter whether it’s $1, $100, or $10,000. You can spend any amount you wish and get twice as much in return. Most people don’t know about this. By the time everyone does know, you’ll have missed the opportunity.

So do you want to know just what the heck is this totally legitimate, risk free, double your money plan brought to you by inflation?

It’s pennies!

Copper pennies. The kind you can get from any bank. Specifically, those pennies minted before 1982 (with a few exceptions).

Back when our money was worth something — and just as importantly, when its value was stable and predictable — the penny was composed of 5% zinc and 95% copper. As the welfare state grew during the 20th century, the value of the dollar dropped further and further. By 1982, the dollar had fallen so far that Congress had to change the metallic composition of the penny. They had no choice because it actually cost more to make a penny than it was worth. That’s what I’d call depravity.

The situation arose because we were then in the midst of, and are now almost finished with, our transition away from commodity money.

Commodity money is just a term for money that is valued for its own intrinsic worth, arising out of the nature of the money itself, rather than promises of value guaranteed by a gun pointed at everyone’s back (that’s what “full faith and credit” really means). The United States used it for more than a century, up until 1913, and its value was fairly stable over that time. In 1913, we got the IRS and the Federal Reserve Bank and fiat currency, and the downward spiral began. Roosevelt confiscated and banned monetary gold in 1933, which was a significant step toward despotism, but far from the final act. The nation’s coinage was still made of silver, and its face value was worth approximately (although less and less) what was in the coin.

Silver went away in the 60s. We usually think of 1964 as the cut-off date, but many people forget that half dollars were minted with a smaller amount of silver until 1969. We like to destroy ourselves gradually in this country, not all at once like some of those third world nations.

And then the lowly penny required a composition change in 1982. It went from mostly copper to mostly zinc. We do have a bit lower to go, because the nickel still contains nickel, and the rest of our coins are not yet made of steel. Or plastic.

Back to today. That pre-1982 penny, which has a face value of only one cent and will cost you only one cent to get your paws on, actually has a metal value of about 2.3 cents as I write this (April 2010). So you can go down to the bank, buy a bundle of pennies, sort out the copper ones, and more than double your investment.

As inflation continues, the dollar value of your copper pennies will gradually increase. Even if some calamity happened and the copper market collapsed, you would still have your original investment. The penny has a face value of one cent, so even if its metal value fell to half a penny, you could still get one cent for your penny. As long as the United States are around and haven’t reneged on any more promises, that is. There may be little upside, but there is little risk. Think about it — a 100% profit on any sum of money is yours for the asking.

Now, on to some practical issues.

First, this is completely ethical. It is not stealing from the government, as many in government actually want us to believe.

The same phenomenon happened with silver coins decades ago. As their real value exceeded their face value, they disappeared from circulation in a simple demonstration of Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. At the time, there were many news reports and politicians making noise about how hoarding silver coins was unpatriotic.

It is totally patriotic, moral, right, and legal (for now) to hoard coins for the purpose of making a profit on them. This is a very important point that is lost on many people today, especially the people in my generation who didn’t grow up in a world of commodity money.

People often wonder how they would ever get the value out of these pennies. One way is to simply keep them and exchange them with others at their true value. A silver dollar is worth almost $14 today. I could buy $14 worth of something and just hand over the silver dollar, if the other party was willing to accept it.

Another way to extract the value from your copper pennies is to melt them. This is commonly done with old silver coins — companies will buy up old coins, melt them, and sell the silver for industrial use. I’d rather have the beautiful old coins, but it’s not my silver.

This method is only theoretical, because a few years ago, our government banned the melting of nickels and pennies. Actually, this rule emanated directly from the Treasury Department in a very improper manueuver (remember when new laws came from the will of the people expressed through Congress, through an established process, not ad hoc whenever some Department deems it necessary?) The idea was that if everybody realized that copper pennies are worth more than their face value, they would disappear from circulation as crafty people melted them down for a profit (is that a problem?) Nevertheless, they have banned the practice, claiming that the need to preserve the nation’s pocket change is at stake, and anyone profiting from these coins, beyond simply storing them, is a thief.

How could you be a thief by melting down that which rightfully belongs to you? You own your money, not the government. They have no right to tell you what you can do with it or whether you can keep it, sell it, or modify it, except to prevent fraud. This holds true whether it’s gold, silver, or the trashy cupro-nickel tokens of today.

The whole point of exchanging value with others is to own the thing that you end up storing the value in, whether it’s real estate, stocks, money, or pumpkins. If we lived in a society that valued the intrinsic worth of metal and demanded to receive it in business transactions, and the government stepped in and said “No, that metal is just on loan from us. You can’t melt it or sell it for more than its face value. You can’t turn it into jewelry or dental work. You can only exchange it to us for worthless scraps of paper,” then nobody would store the product of their labors in something that the government could take over. You would have to be stupid to do so. You would also have to be stupid to trade away something of value and receive something of lesser value in return. Hence, Gresham’s law. No government can contradict reality, even if it really, really wants to.

Money as an object is no different than a house or a car. On principle, by virtue of your having earned it, it is your property to do with as you please. It makes no difference that the words “United States” appear on a coin. They only minted it and guaranteed its purity and value. Once it passes into your hands, legitimately, it is yours.

I can only make predictions about the future. If pennies (and soon, nickels) follow the same course as silver coins, they will gradually disappear from circulation, and one day trade at something higher than face value. The government may or may not lift the ban on melting. But you can profit just by holding onto them.

The price of copper is not guaranteed to do anything beneficial for you. It goes up and down. I suspect, as many others do, that it’s going to go up over time along with inflation. Again, even if it went down, your pennies should still be worth what you paid for them, future Congressional craziness notwithstanding. Even though copper pennies are a pretty boring investment, be careful to know all the facts and facets anyway.

Which base metal coins are worth more than their face value? Right now, it is the pre-1982 penny (2.3 cents), the U.S. nickel (6 cents), the 1955 – 1981 Canadian nickel (11 cents), and Canadian pennies minted before 1997 (they have values ranging from 1.9 cents to 2.4 cents). These prices are from the day I wrote this article, April 5, 2010. They can go up and down. I don’t know about countries outside of North America, but I’d appreciate reader reports.

Any U.S. penny that was minted before 1982 is mostly copper, except for 1943, when they were temporarily made of steel because of the war. Some 1982 pennies are copper, and some are zinc. To identify them, you can look at dates, weigh them, feel them, or listen to them — a copper penny will ring when thrown against a hard surface; a zinc penny will just thud. I can usually pick out the good ones on sight, without seeing the date, and I can always identify them by feeling. Don’t waste your time looking at dates.

If you decide to collect copper pennies with the expectation of making a profit on them, you’re counting on a few things being true:

1. The value of copper being higher than the face value of the penny.
2. Being able to find someone who will buy your pennies for their metal value, rather than face value. This has happened with silver coins.
3. Being legally allowed to melt the pennies and sell bulk copper, if you want to do it that way.

I hang on to them because I just can’t stand the idea of spending one cent that is actually worth two. And because they belong to me and not any government. If they made the mistake of destroying their currency and I find some legitimate way to make a profit from it, that is just a meager form of compensation for all of the other things they’ve taken from me. Another way to look at it is that commodity money, when viewed properly, is itself an investment and an object of speculation, as well as money with a guaranteed face value. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It’s no injustice that I found a tiny way to win and other people did not.

I toss my pennies and nickels into a bin and mostly forget about them. Maybe I’ll make a profit on them someday. Mostly, I enjoy feeling like Scrooge McDuck!

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1. The Smart Way to Invest in Gold and Silver
2. Retirement is a Scam
3. Working for Love or Money

So what am I actually doing to reverse my nearsightedness? It’s really simple, so far, and it almost sounds dumb.

Remember that scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when they’re driving the Ferrari home after a day of joyriding? They realize that they have to somehow erase the miles they put on the car. Ferris says they’ll just drive the car home backwards!

It doesn’t work that way with cars, as they discover, but it might work with vision.

The system I’m trying out advises myopes to wear plus lenses in addition to doing various eye exercises. The idea is that if negative lenses make your vision more nearsighted, then plus lenses should make them better. I laughed aloud when I first read it because it sounded too good to be true!

But it fits with the theory. As far as I know, there’s no harm in making the world even blurrier than it already is, so I tried it. I wore some very weak +1.25 lenses (the cheap kind from a drug store) and read a few chapters of a book. I positioned the book at such a distance from my eyes that I could make out the text crisply and clearly without glasses, but if I moved the book a bit further, the text would begin to blur. Then I put on the plus lenses. You have to read text that is blurry but slightly readable, but not so blurry that you can’t read it at all. You can’t focus on an unintelligible blob, but if you can make it out slightly, you can train your eyes to focus just a little bit farther. And then farther and farther, reversing the process that made you a slave to your glasses. That’s the idea, anyway.

The first thing I wondered is why I would need to wear plus lenses to blur some text, when I could easily move a book or a computer screen away from me to the point that I can’t easily read anything. As I soon found out, it can be uncomfortable to read a book held out at arm’s length. Now I understand why hyperopes carry around plus lenses. I always thought, if you can read a newspaper at a distance but not close up, why not just read it at a distance? The problem is that the text might be clear, but it’s small. In my case, I can just barely make out 12 point text held at arm’s length. Even if I could see it clearly, it would be uncomfortable to read at that distance. And then if I could correct my vision to the degree that I could clearly see text at arm’s length, how would I extend the improvements to further distances? By trying to read the newspaper from across the room? Hence, the plus lenses.

I actually noticed some changes to my vision. Being of sound mind, I didn’t get too excited. They were small improvements to begin with, and I also made sure that I wasn’t subconsciously moving my head in closer, squinting, or using the lensing effect of tearing in the eyes to sharpen my vision. Once I made some adjustments to my set up to keep all of these factors under control, I was satisfied that my observations of improvement were reliable.

If I stare at a page of blurred text with weak plus lenses, eventually I am able to resolve it and see the text as clearly as if I was not wearing the lenses. This claim is pretty wild in itself, since any self-reported vision changes are pretty subjective. I even hesitated to make it so early on, wanting to verify it a few dozen or more times before I made it public. I am sure of what I am seeing, however.

I’ve been a graphic designer for many years and I have a very good visual memory. When I experiment with focusing on text, I will place a book at the farthest point I can clearly see the text and remember exactly what it looks like. Then I will move the book further, so that the text is blurred, but not so much that it’s completely unreadable. I get a visual memory of how blurred the letters are. As I converge and diverge my eyes, eventually the text comes into focus. Sometimes it almost snaps into focus, like a camera rapidly adjusting to a different distance. I understand the limits of subjective reporting of visual experiences, but I am confident that this is actually happening without any subterfuge on my part.

So is this significant or not? Maybe all eyes can make minor, temporary upgrades in vision. I couldn’t even tell you how much my vision changes during this easily repeatable experience, but I’m sure that it’s a fraction of a diopter. So I wonder if there is some range of better focusing that even a myopic eye can accomplish — but anything outside that small range is permanently inaccessible.

Going with the theory that my eyes gradually adjusted to negative stimulus over many years, the way to reverse it (I hope) is to subject my eyes to positive stimulus. As I have read, this would involve holding some text out to the blur point and sharpening up my focus that fraction of a diopter that I can control (which still astonishes me). Then if I read this way for a few hours every day, I will become more and more able to focus at a slightly farther distance, and then I’ll move on to yet farther distances. The plus lenses will help me to increase my focusing power while keeping the blur point within arm’s reach, to make it easier to read.

This slight sharpening of my vision that I have under my control may not be so surprising at all. Maybe an eye expert could tell me that I’m wrong to be astonished by it. Still, since I can sharpen up my vision slightly, if I keep practicing it, maybe I can gradually make it better and better. My vision gradually got worse and worse, probably through the same process of accommodation.

I haven’t gotten into the theories explaining what muscles might make this work, if it works at all. Everyone has a different model, and it will take more study of both the established and the fringe ideas to understand what might be happening physiologically.

I’m definitely on the fringe, though, but I’m exploring it with absolute fidelity to reason. Some ideas that are universally accepted as true today were once considered to be fringe hypotheses. There are some ideas that are considered wacky but I’d defend with everything I’ve got. For example, there is so much good evidence and clear thinking behind neolithic foods being responsible for modern diseases, one way or another, that I’d almost bet my life on it. Except that modern nutritional scientists probably wouldn’t give the idea a fair hearing. You might say it’s because they’re so myopic.

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1. Unglassed – Day 72
2. Unglassed – Day 1
3. Unglassed – Day 21

In my research on vision, I’ve encountered many competing hypotheses and much truth and falsehood. The modern school of thought holds that one’s vision problems are inherited and can not be corrected with exercises. A nearsighted eye is physically elongated, while a farsighted eye is shorter than it should be. Glasses don’t cause or contribute to the problem, in the modern view, but correct it. Whatever refractive error exists in your eyes you’re stuck with, wishes and pleadings aside. I have to admit that their appeal to rationality and science always struck a chord with me.

The natural vision people all say various things about vision; among them, that glasses can make vision problems worse, that relaxing the eyes can restore vision, that exercising the eyes in the right way can restore clear vision, and that vision can change for the better just as it can change for the worse. Some of them — not all — also swear that one’s psychological or emotional state affects vision. Or, that being myopic in vision means being myopic emotionally. It’s so easy to refute that kind of thinking that I won’t even bother.

There are many different programs, exercises, and theories that fall under the umbrella of natural vision correction. Some of them are even contradictory. With all of the confusion on this side, I can understand the demand for facts and science by the modern ophthalmologists.

Now that I’ve studied both sides and done some experiments on my own, I can clearly state the essence of the natural vision approach. This allows me to dispense with the weaker or just plain wrong aspects of the movement and tease out the key ideas that may have value.

What it’s really about is this: The idea that the eye, like other parts of the body, is an adaptive organ. Normally it functions as evolution “intended,” but if subject to unusual forces, it will adapt to accommodate different circumstances. Not unlike how all organisms, sentient or not, can physically adapt to their environments, sometimes over the span of generations, and sometimes over a lifetime.

Modern humans exist in a world that is dramatically different than the one experienced by their ancestors millions of years ago. We now spend a lot of time focusing our eyes on tools or objects within a few feet of us, and much, much less time scanning the horizon for prey or predators. So our eyes tend to adapt to this closeup world. People who spend a lifetime focusing close by gradually lose the ability to focus far away. It’s a simple idea that fits with some easy observations you can make about our modern world, the most significant of which is that the rate of myopia has increased dramatically in recent decades. This increase correlates with dramatic changes in our environment: books, TV, computers, and a life spent mostly indoors. While it’s only an unproven correlation, genetics alone can’t explain the recent explosion in myopia.

The natural vision camp also says that eyeglasses are more like a crutch than a cure. If you gave a crutch to a man with a broken foot, you couldn’t say that the crutch cured his deficiency in walking. The crutch enables him to walk better, but the cause of the problem has nothing to do with the crutch and must be healed through a different process. Similarly, it’s been argued that eyeglasses are just a crutch that enable myopic eyes to see clearly, but do nothing to correct the cause of the myopia. In fact, the glasses tend to make the myopia worse, through the same process of adaptation that created it in the first place.

This approach treats the myopic eye as a deficient organ that should be restored to its original state, while the modern approach treats the myopic eye as a normal casualty of life on this planet, which can only be adjusted (and then adjusted again and again over the years) back to normal with a special appliance called eyeglasses.

The downward slide starts when you focus more on an inner, often intellectual world, and less on the big world of trees and sky and Nature in which our ancestors evolved. Then you’re prescribed glasses to fix your vision. As you focus even closer in — though it seems like you can see better than ever — you gradually become dependent on the glasses. Take them off and the world is an incoherent blur. Put them back on and you can see all near and far, while your focus is really on the near even when you’re looking far. (Please note that I’m not in any way suggesting that dispensing with books and romping through nature is superior to living as a rational person, only that life is different now than in the distant past and thus has different consequences for our bodies.)

That’s the essence of it. Some of the modern ophthalmologists might even agree with the evolutionary aspect, but probably not with the idea that if eyes can adapt to a negative stimulus, then they can adapt to a positive stimulus. If the environment can make your vision worse, than it can make it better. If you create the right environment.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems to be true at least in some form. I am committed to test it. With only 9 days until the end of my original trial of living without glasses (except driving and hockey), I am now sure that I could put up with it for the months that would be necessary to produce whatever improvements are really possible. In fact, I’m afraid to wear glasses now. I don’t want to hurt my vision any more than I already have. As always, I’m completely open to a vigorous debate — the science is far from settled, but I can’t wait around for modern doctors to give these ideas an honest trial (just as I eat an evolutionarily inspired diet, rather than wait around for scientists to prove that saturated fat and cholesterol are good and sugar and grains are evil).

Measuring my progress accurately and just doing things that are beneficial in the first place is a real challenge. It has actually taken me several weeks to wade through all the different ideas and come up with a program. More on that tomorrow.

Goal Meter – Intuitive Goal Tracking for iPhone

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1. Unglassed – Day 22
2. Unglassed – Day 12
3. Unglassed – Day 4

Today I’m announcing my first iPhone app, Goal Meter, which is an intuitive way to track multiple goals and get motivated to reach them. I’ll explain why it works so well and how you can use this technique even if you don’t have an iPhone.

Basically, you choose a goal that can be represented with numbers, such as taking lessons, earning money, losing weight, or writing articles. A progress bar grows and changes color as you get closer to your goal, providing a visual and spatial way to track your goals.

I did not design Goal Meter to compete with all of the other personal development apps already available. I had the idea years ago and only recently decided to bring it to the iPhone (which was an interesting journey by itself). When I finished the app, I took a look at the competition and was pleasantly surprised to find that no one else had followed my approach to goal tracking.

Most of the other goal tracking apps are too complex. It takes dozens of steps just to register some progress toward a goal. You have to wade through due dates, to do style checkboxes, and other fluff. Many of them also confuse goals with habits. You might want to establish the habit of taking a vitamin every day, so the way too complicated goal trackers handle it with weekly calendars and flags if you’ve missed a day and alerts and reminders. Yuck. Goal Meter is effective because it gets to the essence of goal tracking.

Setting up Goal Meter is easy. You enter a name for your goal, then select a number that represents the end point of your journey. It could be $10,000 earned, 50 articles written, or 1,000 hours of practice at a skill you’re acquiring. Then you choose where to start from (usually zero), where you happen to be now (also usually zero), and the increment amount, which is basically just the amount of hours / dollars / whatever you’ll add to your goal each time you make progress. You might want to track income in increments of $500 while tracking the number of lessons you’ve had with an increment of one. That’s all there is to setting it up.

You start out with a black screen with two big plus and minus buttons on it. Every time you make progress toward your goal, you hit the plus button. Goal Meter adds the amount you chose, slowly building a progress bar from the bottom to the top of the screen (that’s the meter part). You start out with a blank screen, and by the time you reach your goal, the progress bar fills the entire screen. Additionally, the color of the bar transitions from red to orange to yellow to green as it grows. You can really visualize the progress you’re making.

I came up with the idea when I was first learning to play hockey. I read that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill but only 1,000 hours to achieve competence. I was inspired to learn to skate and play hockey, and I had a strong vision of where I wanted to be in 1,000 hours. The trouble is, that’s a long time in the future. Ice time is expensive, and I can only physically handle so many practice sessions in a week or a month.

While I was comfortable setting this long term goal, there were many times, especially in the beginning, when I became frustrated with my seeming lack of progress. I knew where I started from, I knew where I wanted to be, and I knew I was putting the time in — so why did I feel like I wasn’t making any progress? Those thoughts can be very demotivating.

So I did the most sensible thing I could think of. I drew a grid of 1,024 squares (because it made a perfect square and was close enough to 1,000). Each square represented one hour of practicing or playing hockey. Every time I spent an hour working toward my goal, I colored in a square. I didn’t track dates. I didn’t track my time in minute, highly accurate numbers — I hate record keeping as it is. But I could handle coloring in a square now and then.

The squares slowly added up. As colored spots marched across the page, I could see how much progress I was really making — and more importantly, I could just see that I was making progress. My progress chart became a real source of motivation for me. Even when I had a day where I felt I made no progress on the ice — or even regressed — I knew that back in my office there would be some kind of result or reward for all my work. Knowing that I would color in one of those squares kept me focused on the purpose of each individual practice session — long term growth. The frustration I used to feel completely disappeared.

I had such fantastic results with this goal tracking idea that I knew it deserved to become software. The iPhone is the ideal platform for such an application. Although I had never written anything more complex than a few Javascripts now and then, I plunged into Objective-C and wrote this little app over the course of about five days. That might sound like a lot to my readers who do program, but remember that I was a total beginner.

I am especially proud of the fit and finish I put into the app. For such a simple app, I had to attend to a surprising amount of detail to bring it up to my standards. It was worth it, because dozens of people downloaded Goal Meter when it entered the app store, and in that short time I received many positive comments.

Goal Meter tracks multiple goals in a straightforward and appealing way. You don’t have to track hockey practice with it. You could track piano practice, French lessons, money earned, articles written — almost anything. You can also track negative goals, which means weight loss. Suppose you want to start at 150 pounds and end at 130 pounds. Goal Meter will detect that you’re tracking a negative goal and reverse the display logic appropriately. So when you lose a pound and hit the minus button, the progress bar will grow instead of shrink, since losing actually means gaining in that case.

As simple as it is, I use Goal Meter every day. I’m tracking every important goal in my life right now. At a quick glance, I can see where I stand on all of the things that matter to me.

I invite you to check out Goal Meter on the App Store. It’s the best goal tracking app out there!

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1. Strive for More or Be Satisfied Where You Are?
2. Month Clock
3. List Your Options

It’s been awhile since my last update on the unglassed situation. I certainly don’t intend to make a habit of posting so sparsely, but I’ve been working on a neat project these past few days. I’ll have an announcement for it soon.

Driving

A question I’ve frequently been asked is whether I wear my glasses while driving. The answer is yes. The law requires me to do so even though I can see pretty well in broad daylight. Your pupils contract in bright light which actually reduces the effect of myopia somewhat. Similarly, myopic vision tends to get worse in the dark as your pupils expand. I would feel safe driving during the day with my glasses off, because daylight reduces my refractive error to a noticeable and helpful degree. At this point in the retraining of my vision, I would not consider driving at night without glasses.

I also wear my glasses when I play hockey. Combined with driving time, this amounts to about a dozen hours each week back under the dreaded negative lenses. Many of the reports of successful natural vision correction include small periods of time wearing the very glasses you’re trying to free yourself from. In this world, it would be hard to go completely without. I thought about taking a taxi everywhere, but it would be inconvenient. Especially since I live 20 minutes from a decent grocery store. And I’m not giving up hockey, either, so I’m stuck with my glasses for a while longer.

I wear my glasses so infrequently that I really notice them when I do wear them. Beyond being as annoying as ever, my glasses actually hurt my eyes a bit when I wear them. I wonder if my vision has improved by even a fraction of a diopter by now — maybe that explains why my vision with glasses seems super-sharp in a way that I don’t remember when I wore them all the time.

Magic Eye

My collection of children’s books now has a medical benefit! It may sound strange, but I’ve been practicing convergence and divergence with the help of old Magic Eye books. Remember those? You stare at a scrambled pattern in just the right way and a 3D image appears.

The illusion works when you converge or diverge your eyes, which is basically either going cross-eyed or focusing on a point behind the point you’re staring at, respectively. Many people have trouble doing this with their eyes. In fact, one of the guides I read actually suggests taking one week each to practice convergence, divergence, and rapidly switching between the two.

I have always had the ability to converge or diverge my vision at will. I never, ever had to pull the Magic Eye book up to my nose and slowly pull it away to get the image. I understand that many people lack the ability to see these pictures at will, but it’s a skill worth acquiring.

Converging and diverging your vision is one way to increase the strength of your extraocular muscles, which become underused when you rely on glasses to do your focusing for you. I’m sure that perfect vision is not as simple as just looking at Magic Eye books, but it’s good training. Rather than converging or diverging on some random spot, viewing a stereogram will produce an identifiable image when it’s done correctly. Most stereograms are designed to be viewed with divergence (or focusing into the distance), while a convergent (or cross-eyed) view will typically produce an inverted image. So you have an easy way to tell which way you’re focusing, since you need to practice both methods.

I’ve been taking time to converge and diverge on Magic Eye stereograms throughout each day. I challenge myself to hold the 3D view for as long as I can from further and further away.

Removing my glasses and warming up the muscles around my eyes is a slow but necessary part of fixing my vision. If this is going to work at all, it will happen very gradually and probably only after hours and hours of boring stuff. That’s okay, because better vision will be worth it — if it works, that is.

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1. Unglassed – Day 22
2. Unglassed – Day 21
3. Unglassed – Day 4

Life is a whole lot better without glasses, apart from the blurry vision. I can touch any part of my face without consideration for a fragile appliance sitting on my head. I can take my shirt off or put it on without damaging anything. I can lay my head on my pillow. I can do all these things without delay when I’m not wearing glasses.

The downside is that my uncorrected vision could use some serious improvement. I’ve adapted to being unglassed and I get around comfortably. My work at the computer isn’t slowed down too much. I find myself bringing my head in for a closer look at times, but I can keep it at the same distance I usually work from, 18 inches (which is probably too close).

Today I continued learning about the various methods of vision correction. I found out that the idea of removing my glasses for a month falls under relaxation, while other philosophies add or emphasize strengthening the muscles that control the eyes with various exercises. Some books suggest nothing but relaxation techniques like removing glasses as the way to correct vision. The other school of thought says that although relaxation is valuable, only actively working the eyes can produce results. They say that the many people who fail to achieve any vision correction have either not bothered with strengthening exercises, gave up on them, or didn’t do enough.

I’m inclined to believe the strengthening people, so I will be testing those techniques as well as relaxing my eyes every chance I get.

Much of the literature I’ve found is hard to read or just plain archaic, which certainly lends to the air of pseudoscience. Not long after I had that thought, however, I remembered a recent newspaper article I saved and dug it up. It’s a little blurb from the mainstream media that actually casts some doubt on the purely genetic interpretation of myopia. These nice people say:

The number of Americans who need glasses is rising sharply, according to a new study at the National Eye Institute. The scientists, writing in a recent issue of Archives of Opthalmology, found a 66% increase in myopia — the medical term for nearsightedness — since the 1970s, equalling 47 million people. … What’s more, there was a swing from mild to more severe myopia over the 30-year period.”
Parade Magazine, February 7, 2010

Ah, Parade Magazine. Now you can see what quality literature I read! Actually, I’m lucky if I even get to Parade Magazine when I read the newspaper. I usually read only the comics*. But I digress…

So myopia has increased 66% in the last 40 years? What could be the reason? As the article explains later: “The reason for the increase is unknown…” Since we all know that myopia is a genetic disease, the dramatic increase must be due to rapid evolution… NOT!

Seriously, little statistics like that remind me why I’m doing this experiment. The issue is far from settled. It appears that years of near work and glasses wearing both cause and worsen myopia. I’m almost certain that we didn’t evolve to become half-blind by our teenage years. The main question is whether the damage is permanent or reversible?

As I read through this archaic semi-medical literature, I’m encountering many different theories along with many possible solutions — many more than I realized. Some of the natural vision people even claim that you can’t fix your vision once it’s degraded past a certain point. I’m willing to try, though.

Once I sort through it all, I will be able to post more specifics about my own program.

By the way, to be fair to the article I mentioned above, they did quote a doctor who blames lifestyle. And it ended by saying that studies show that children who spend more time outdoors have less myopia. But it says nothing about what mechanism may be leading to all of this glasses wearing, or what might be done to either prevent or reverse it. The article doesn’t challenge anything; this alarming increase in nearsightedness is passed along as a curiosity that researchers don’t know what to do with.

*It’s been fifteen years since Calvin and Hobbes ended and the comics page still isn’t the same.

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1. Unglassed – Day 12
2. Unglassed – Day 22
3. Unglassed – Day 21

Today was my first full day without glasses. Here’s how it went.

I mostly just spent the day adapting to life without glasses. Last night, I developed a headache, which is unusual for me. I’m sure it had something to do with the forced change in my vision.

Obviously, my world was fuzzy and blurry. I’m not used to living this way, so I was pretty frustrated. Plus I had a headache, which I assume is related to the need to use my eyes differently. The act of seeing is taking a huge effort. In the past, I just took it for granted, but now it seems like I have to put effort into it, and it actually makes me tired. I just didn’t feel like straining to look at anything today, which means I can’t get any work done. In fact, I did a whole lot of nothing. I decided to relax and just let myself adapt to this new situation. I listened to Thriller and some ragtime and tried not to think about all the work that I’m leaving undone.

While I was eating breakfast, I made some unexpected observations about how I see. My seat at the kitchen table faces a window that I like to look through as I eat. I noticed that as I was staring into space, my focus was actually fixed on a spot somewhere directly in front of my face, rather than on the trees or houses I was looking at in the distance. Several times, I caught myself looking at a tree or a house, assuming that I was just passively looking at it — but I was actually focusing on that imaginary point in front of my face. It’s hard to describe. It was as though I was looking at a faraway object, thinking that I was looking at that object, before realizing that my vision was not focused on that object at all. My vision in these situations gave me the feeling of being in a daze, even though my mind was totally alert. Each time I realized this, I snapped my vision back under control and focused away from the point in space and onto the distant object. I immediately felt better, even though my powers of focus could not completely resolve the houses or trees in the distance — that is, they remained blurred, only less so. And, I have to add, although they were blurry, I perceived that I was looking right at them, rather than at empty space.

I assumed that the point in front of my face to which my focus habitually went would be exactly where the lenses of my glasses would sit. It’s hard to say exactly where that habitual focusing point is, but it seems to be a few inches from the front of my face. It’s hard to say.

I went for a walk in the wonderful spring weather. I had no trouble getting around, and I am confident that I could drive safely with the level of vision that I have now. I couldn’t read the signs, though.

I also noticed some kind of blister or irritated area on the part of my left ear, where the temple arms of my glasses would rest. I don’t know how long it has been there, but I assume my glasses caused it. I wonder why I never noticed it before — or is this a parting gift from my ex-friend?

I made some adaptations to my computer to make it easier to see. I increased the font size in my main text editor so that I could type and read comfortably while sitting back in my chair (I’m glad I have a big Cinema Display!) Surprisingly, I can still read text at its normal size without getting absurdly close to the screen. Also, Apple provides a screen zooming tool that you can access either by pressing Control and scrolling with a Mighty Mouse or trackpad, or by using Option-Command-“=“ and Option-Command-“-“. It’s very helpful. You can enable those tools in the Universal Access control panel, which before today I never had a use for.

I keep bringing my hand up to the side of my head as though I’m adjusting phantom glasses. One day isn’t long enough to destroy an ingrained habit like that. I laugh, though, because if I had been wearing glasses, I would not even realize that I was adjusting them. I was actually surprised by how often I must be adjusting my glasses each day. Changing your environment in even one small way can really help you focus on things that you’re missing. It’s like visiting a foreign country — even Canada — and then returning home to a familiar place that suddenly seems different. So far, removing my glasses is forcing me to change my focus in more ways than just what I’m looking at.

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1. Unglassed – Day 22
2. Unglassed – Day 4
3. Unglassed – Day 21