The zig zag test

Happening to be in the Running Horse in Davies Street yesterday, I happened to notice a rather fine light bulb, which illuminated without dazzling and with a complicated filament which I had not come across before.

Rather to my surprise, Bing was able to turn up the bulb in question in seconds, with the Google version being given at reference 1 below. A tribute to search technology generally.

But the test is actually about something else. My telephone was not able to capture the glowing filament at all, all one got was something like the left or right hand images in the illustration above. While my eye was quite able to focus the glowing filament itself.

So the retina clearly had the capability to register the amount of light coming in and to turn down the volume locally so that it could extract the desired image from the signal that was left. A bit of distributed intelligence not given to my telephone: its light sensitive array may well be very large but it is also very dim. No pun intended.

I associated this morning to the ICL venture called content addressable filestore (CAF), all the thing back in the early eighties, but now, I imagine, overtaken by the march of progress. This device included search logic very close to the read heads of the disc, rather than in the relatively remote central processor unit, with the result that it could process large amounts of information extremely quickly. No doubt GCHQ boughts rooms full of the things.

A reminder that, at that time, we had lots of world class engineers, well worth being bought up, in this case, by Fujitsu. This particular idea may not have made ICL lots of money, but it was a good idea, well worth a punt. Fully part of moving the technology forward.

Reference 1:' zigzag filament light bulbs images', or put another way https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=zigzag+filament+light+bulbs+images.