Visualizing Ethernet Speed 140
anthemaniac writes "In the blink of an eye, you can transfer files from one computer to another using Ethernet. And in the same amount of time, your eye sends signals to the brain. A study finds that images transferred to the brain and files across an Ethernet network take about the same amount of time." From the article: "The researchers calculate that the 100,000 ganglion cells in a guinea pig retina transmit roughly 875,000 bits of information per second. The human retina contains about 10 times more ganglion cells than that of guinea pigs, so it would transmit data at roughly 10 million bits per second, the researchers estimate. This is comparable to an Ethernet connection, which transmits information between computers at speeds of 10 million to 100 million bits per second."
Nice comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but we have better encoding.
Inaccurate blurb. (Score:3, Interesting)
anthemaniac writes:
The amount of time you transmit data over a network depends on round trip time and bandwidth product, which determines TCP window size that optimizes the send/ack of data packets. You also need to take collision into account.
The ganglion cells are probably more analogous to link transmitter. The measurement is on the amount of information generated by these cells per second. The proper conclusion is that you could probably use ethernet to connect the eyes and your brain, and the required bandwidth is supported.
Re:Nice comparison (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Neuroscience != Computer Science (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I was all eyes for the article I partly read yesterday or early this am.
Well, even IF the eyes transmit like a network, the eye study is not apples and apples. More like oranges and mangoes.
How many libraries of eye sockets worth of information is that?
I mean, look at the size of the Guinea pig's eye. Of COURSE it transmits less energy. I mean more data to the brain. It's not as if it enlarges to accommodate more data. Hell, the human eye is probably 10 times LARGER without expanding. But, I suppose if the eyes DID expand when more data rate was demanded, such information overloads would lead to a whole new meaning of eye-socket-to-yah....
http://www.pimms-pages.co.uk/ [pimms-pages.co.uk]
And, Guinea Pigs aren't pigs of any sort. It's a terrible name to give something that a real pig could kill just by rolling over it.
http://www.oink.demon.co.uk/pets/guinea.htm [demon.co.uk]
What *I* wanna know is how the eyes of bats comaare to the Guinea Pig and the Chupacabra. And to hell with human eyes. I'm talking about the MOVIE "Chupacabra".
Um yeah, I dunno... (Score:3, Interesting)
Add to that the color depth of the human eye. Granted, not 16 M colors, but still pretty high.
The frame rate of the average human eye is somewhere around 40 fps, I believe. Again, faster than what most streaming videos offer.
Then double all that, 'cause we got two eyes.
I'm pretty sure the "bandwidth" between my eyes and brain is a little faster than even the best ethernet connection.. At least anything that I've seen demonstrated so far.
Re:So if I plug enough CAT5 cables into it... (Score:3, Interesting)
This came up in another discussion a while back, but I suspect that even an average digital camera with a good, wide-angle lens probably captures in a single frame more raw information than the human eye does from the same vantage point in a single glance.
You only think that your eye is a really good camera. In reality, it might be pretty bad -- I suspect that if you could watch the "raw feed" from a human eye on a TV screen, you might find it rather disappointing without all the postprocessing done in the brain's visual cortex. Only a small part of it near the center would be high resolution; only the center region would be color, and the periphery would be just good enough to detect movement, not much else.
I guess in a way you could call this "compression," but in reality it's more a credit to the brain and the way the 'receiver' is designed, to create the feeling of a huge, high-refresh-rate, 180-degree, full color, 3-D panorama, from not particularly impressive source imagery.
Basically, the human visual system makes up for the limitations of its cameras (the eyes) in post. In the synthetic machine world, we do not currently have the processing power nor the software necessary to do the kind of synthesization that the brain does, so instead we give the machines better 'eyes,' because building cameras is something we do know how to do.
A while ago, I heard someone who was involved in machine vision talk about something called the 'picket fence problem.' A person can pretty easily assemble a good idea of the scene on the other side of a picket fence, or a board with a few holes in it, by moving their head back and forth and then re-assembling the narrow-angle views into something more comprehensive, all in real time. I'm not sure whether machine-vision is there yet today (this was quite a while back), but it's a pretty non-trivial process, or so I was led to understand.
More interesting than the 'bitrate equivalence' of the optic nerve, would be some sort of estimation of the "processing power" done by an average person's visual cortex while doing some basic visual activity. I suspect that the result might be surprisingly high, maybe bordering on what would be supercomputer levels right now, solved using current methods.