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From: eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Sensory Modalities (was Re: Musical Virtual Worlds)
Message-ID: <12180@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 3 Dec 90 05:12:30 GMT
References: <1990Nov13.213038.27046@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> <11370@milton.u.washington
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In article <12146@milton.u.washington.edu> cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writ
es:

;This thread is starting to set off my bullfudge meter.  Look.  The bandwidth
;of the optic nerve has been estimated at 1 Mb/s - and this has already been
;highly compressed by the retina.  (I am not an expert here, and I think this
;figure is slightly low - can anyone correct me?)  Perfect sound can be
;duplicated by 16-bit samples at 44Khz.  This is 44,000 * 16= 704Kb/s,
;_uncompressed_.  So by any quantitative standard, vision has greater
;bandwidth than sound.

Your measures are incompatible. Vision must be compared to hearing, not
to sound. Sound must be compared to light.  A sound of 2,000 dynes/square 
cm, which is painfully loud, delivers less energy than the energy of 
sunlight falling on the ear, less than 1/100th of a watt per square cm.
All this shows is that transmitting sound requires far less energy than 
transmitting light, but so what?


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