Aging; declining vision

This morning I received You want hot sex? e-mail spam and my first thought was, My goodness, that sounds tiring. Perhaps I am no longer a youth. In particular, in trying to read tiny print off a failing solid-state drive I found that, wearing their glasses, mst3kmoxie and our daughter could read it more easily than I. Indeed, I had opted to put the drive in a flatbed scanner and read from the scanned image. My distance vision certainly remains very good.

While I now forget the details of past visits to optometrists and similar, I do recall that many years ago my vision was measured at 20/12 and later seemed to have degraded to 20/15 or so. I am due for another eye check which I bother with more for eye health than visual acuity but I now wonder how much further my vision has degraded and how many years away eye correction yet is.

Heuristic for color vileness

I notice that text like this looks vile but text like this looks okay. In RGB the color combination of the former is F0F on 0A0 and the latter is FF0 on 00A. This innocent transposition of digits has a marked effect.

I do not know much about color spaces but I suspect that the explanation is the difference in the relative luminance of the two colors. As far as I can tell from online calculators that difference is very small for the first pair of colors and rather high for the second pair. Relative luminance does not seem trivial to calculate; there are various guides that helpfully offer algorithms but unhelpfully offer different algorithms from one another. I appear to have accidentally found a rabbit hole.