Blue Shark Optics™, the global poker eyewear manufacturer, is announcing today a strategic sponsorship of the World Series of Poker® (WSOP), the largest, richest and most prestigious gaming event in the world.

Effective immediately, a press release says, Blue Shark Optics™ is an official sponsor and the brand will be highly visible during all WSOP events.

Of course, no top player could possibly be without eyewear.

“In today’s era, poker and sunglasses go together like peanut butter and jelly,” said Ty Stewart, the WSOP’s executive director.

“But we’ve never seen a company as committed to the specific needs of poker playersas Blue Shark. We look forward to helping more players discover their great product.”

“Our sponsorship of the World Series of Poker® is a huge accomplishment for our company,” said Kerry Karoutsos, Executive Director of Blue Shark Optics™.

“The WSOP is very selective about the quality of the companies that are its sponsors, and being selected by the WSOP is a strong validation that Blue Shark Optics™ provides a poker-specific product that is valued by those players who require a visual edge at the tables.”

Blue Shark Optics™ manufactures poker-specific eyewear that is designed primarily for indoor use. Their unique Crystalion-3™ lenses hide the eyes and allow maximum light penetration. Unlike dark sunglasses, the lenses provide a superior visual effect which in turn keeps the eyes fresh and rested.

“Wearing dark sunglasses at the poker table is no longer a viable option,” said Monica Lee, Director of Operations for Blue Shark Optics™. “Dark sunglasses may hide the eyes, but they also restrict your vision inducing mistakes and, perhaps more importantly, eye fatigue.

Blue Shark Optics™ solves the problem for the players who prefer to wear sunglasses at the table, because our lenses enable poker players to clearly see the playing field without any eye strain. At the same time, they can be assured that their eyes are completely hidden.”

I’m gonna get me a pair.

The Corpus Clock was recently unveiled (Sept 19th) at Cambridge University. And DAMN is it cool!!!

It is not digital in any way. It is entirely mechanical. The lights are discs of LEDS that shine through small slits in the golden clock face. The picture alone really doesn’t do it justice. Check out the link to the youtube video at the end of the post to see the thing in action. The light appears to travel around the face of the clock every second, minute, and hour. It was designed to remind the viewer about the fleeting, relative nature of time through the way the lights move and interact They appear to move together and even backwards at some points.

The mechanism that turns the gears is based on an invention by a Cambridge clock maker called a grasshopper. The creature at the top is that mechanism. Its called a Chronophage which means “time eater” and it is meant to look as if it is marching along gobbling up time as it passes.

Check out more info on this, its really amazing. Here’s the youtube link and a link to a news article which gives some more detail.

Blindsight is a strange brain/mind condition that philosophers like to discuss in the context of discussions about consciousness.  People with blindsight have a problem with their visual cortex, and as a result are “blind” in an area of their visual field, what is called a scotoma.   Why do I put the word “blind” in quotation marks?  It is because these blindsighted people claim that they don’t see any stimulus in a certain area of their visual field, and there is no reason to believe that they are fabricating, but when asked to guess as to whether a stimulus is present or about specific features of the stimulus, such as whether it is an ‘X’ or an ‘O’, they do considerably better than chance.  These blindsighted individuals still seem to have some sort of awareness – call it “sight” - in the area in which they are blind.   The condition is therefore called “blindsight”.  The cartoon above nicely illustrates the condition.

Some philosophers say that blindsighted people lack a certain type of consciousness, sometimes called phenomenal consciousness, of the objects presented to their visual fields.  These philosophers say things like there is “nothing it is like for these people to see the objects” or “the objects don’t appear any way to them”.  Some philosophers have suggested that non-human animals are like blindsighted people in that they are in some sense aware of what’s going on in their environments, but they aren’t phenomenally conscious of these events.    

Phenomenal consciousness – the way things appear -is what some philosophers, believe makes the mind-body problem so difficult to solve (see e.g. Thomas Nagel or Colin McGinn or David Chalmers or John Searle).  In short, the mind-body problem is the problem of understanding how conscious mental states are related to the body, specifically the brain and central nervous system.  These philosophers wonder about  questions such as these:  How does phenomenal consciousness, something that is subjective, arise from the brain, something that can be understood objectively?  Why does brain state X give rise to phenomenal conscious state Y, as opposed to some other phenomenally conscious state or no phenomenal consciousness at all?   

Perhaps in another post I’ll explain how different philosophers try to answer these philosophical questions.  But in this post I want to briefly discuss an experiment done with a blindsighted person at the University of Oxford.   This experiment was conducted by Navindra Persaud, Peter McLeod and Alan Cowey, and I first read about a synopsis of it by Kaspar Mossman in the journal Scientific American Mind.  

These researchers took a blindsighted person known as GY and asked him to guess about an object placed in his scotoma and then after the guess GY was asked to place a wager, either $1 or half that amount, on his guess.  If his guess was correct, the money that he wagered would be added to his winnings.  However, if his guess was incorrect, the money he wagered would be subtracted from his winnings.  

The experimenters were giving GY an incentive to guess correctly because they wanted to see if GY was conscious of his performance

Although GY guessed correctly about 70% of the time, he chose a high wager only about 50% of the time.  

This surprising result (one would expect the percentages to be roughly the same) raises the question as to why there is a disconnect between cognitive performance (guessing) and placing a wager.  The researchers’ answer is that betting is a special type of decision, one that requires some type of consciousness of one’s performance. 

I don’t really understand this answer.  Does GY know that his ability to guess is better than 50%.  If so, then why doesn’t he make the higher wager each time?  If he doesn’t know that he has this better than average guessing ability, an ability which suggests that he is conscious of the stimulus at some level of consciousness, then why wouldn’t he trust his hunches?  Saying that wagering involves a special decision process doesn’t answer this for me.  

To be fair to the researchers, I think I’ll need to read the actual study, and then I’ll get back to you with my thoughts.