Asklemmy

48758 readers

708 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

How level is "level" to the naked human eye? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago by monovergent@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was putting up some wall decorations earlier today and was painstakingly realigning everything until it looked level to my eyes. It might be just a hair off, but if I don't correct it, I'll see the misalignment almost instantly and get bothered for the rest of time until I fix it. Has anyone investigated, or is there literature on the minimum perceptible angle from level to the naked eye?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] yuri@pawb.social 3 points 3 days ago

depends HEAVILY on the eye. some folks are really good at eyeballing shit. usually this goes hand in hand with other “visual calculus” skills like telling whether two things are the same size or determining angles at a glance.

reckon it’s just spatial reasoning + visualization + practice. i had an uncle who could look at a mechanical system and tell you exactly where all the wear would occur. i always thought it was some kind of savant trick until i started working on similar stuff.

the brain is just another muscle, you can train it to so all sorts of really amazing things!