Cataract progress report

One week ago, I had cataract surgery on my right eye, done by Dr. Kyle Royalty; the implanted lens is an Alcon Clareon monofocal lens, type CC60WF (clear rather than yellowish). This was carefully planned over many years, and I discussed it with two ophthalmologists locally and a couple more on astronomy forums.

One week from today I'll have the same operation on the left eye.

I plan to write more later, but the main thing that is unusual about my case is that I'm getting a large change in refraction. The main symptom of the cataracts was actually that my eyeglass prescription has been changing rapidly for about three years; I've become more nearsighted, and just before the operation, my prescription was about -7 in both eyes.

The other symptom was a loss of sharpness, mild in the left eye, severe in the right eye, which developed a large blurry patch in the center of the field. For about a year I had been relying on the left eye for fine details.

I chose to have both eyes corrected for distance vision (prescription 0, or, actually, my doctor aimed for -0.25; he seems to have hit it very close). Although many people choose to have one eye corrected for far distance and one for reading, I had eyes that worked that way when I was a child, and they gave me headaches. So I chose equality.

I chose monofocal lenses — lenses that do not try to focus on more than one distance. The reason is that true presbyopia-correcting (focusable) lenses have not been perfected; instead, multifocal lenses give you a sharp image superimposed on a blurry image, or at best, they focus only part of the incoming light from any given distance. I keep hearing from people who were sold expensive multifocal lenses (they cost more, so they must be better, right?) and got disappointing results.

According to the literature, the Alcon Clareon CC60WF does include slight asphericity, as does the lens of the eye itself, and this is supposed to increase depth of focus, but I have not noticed perceptible spherical aberration.

A few notes:

• The operation was quick and painless. During the operation, I was given very light sedation from which I did not feel any effect. I took Tylenol the first day for slight stinging; there has been no eye pain since then.
• Immediately after the operation, I could tell the new lens was in focus, but there was a blurry glare around everything because my eyes were dilated so wide that light could pass around the edges of the 6-mm-diameter lens. That remained the case for about two days!
• I am counting on my eyes not to dilate wider than 6 mm in the dark. At my age, that seems realistic. As I will explain more fully later, astronomers' belief that eyes dilate to 7 mm is actually a mistake about naval binoculars, which have 7-mm exit pupils to allow variation of eye position on a rolling ship, not because people's eyes are actually that wide.
• Focus will continue shifting slightly for days as my eye heals.
• Colors looked considerably less yellow through the "new" eye, but within minutes, I felt intuitively that the new (bluer) colors were correct (matching my memories) and the old eye's yellower colors were unpleasant. The difference was about equal to a CC15Y photographic filter (as have just verified by comparing eyes and using actual filters; earlier I estimated CC30Y, which was too much). The picture in Alcon's ad may exaggerate it somewhat.
• In the first minutes after the operation, my color vision was disrupted in another way, brownish, apparently because of the very strong bluish-white light from the operating microscope. That cleared up very quickly.
• I have had only a couple of brief opportunities to do astronomy with the "new" eye, but it is startling to look up at the sky and see pinpoint stars in the sky without wearing glasses. They are often sharper than the view I had with glasses in the past. There are no problems with telescopes or binoculars with exit pupils up to 5 mm (the largest I have tried). I have not yet been out under a dark country sky.
• Right now, my main problem is that the left eye hasn't been corrected yet, and with my postoperative glasses (which are 0 to +2 progressive readers), it gives a very blurry view. I tried substituting the left-eye lens from my preoperative glasses, which have matching frames, but the mismatch of image size and edge distortion is so severe as to be unusable. So I am doing my work one-eyed and not driving.
• Without strong -7 glasses in front of it, the right eye gives an image that is about 15% bigger. Also, to a person looking at me wearing my newer, thinner glasses, my eyes look bigger and farther apart.

One last note. I had no idea how tiring the whole process would be. Partly, it's that walking around with mismatched eyes is like wearing crutches. And partly I think there was some physical strain involved. I'll be glad to have it over and join the ranks of the farsighted!

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Music & Sound (M&S) Inter-Call D-2 intercom repair

Here is what you've been waiting for. I finished repairing the intercom in the grandchildren's house and made a video about it — not the best video I've ever made, but useful to people working on similar intercoms (there must be one or two in the world). In the video I describe the circuit in some detail, showing the diagram, before launching into the repair.

Tariffs are here

I'm hearing of people getting packages via UPS or DHL containing things they bought from overseas, and to their dismay, a tariff is due — sometimes a large fraction of what they paid for the merchandise. The carrier, such as UPS, had to pay this in order to bring the package into the United States, and they have to be paid back for it.

And I'm hearing loud complaints, "The other country is supposed to pay the tariff!"

No, no, no. That is not how tariffs work. United States tariffs are taxes paid to the United States by whoever brings something into the United States.

I am sad that so many of my fellow citizens did not know this or have been deceived about it.

The United States cannot make "the other country" pay taxes. (Can Sweden or Canada make you pay taxes?) Countries don't tax each other. That is part of what it means to be in one country and not another.

The nearest "the other country" could come to paying the tariff is this: If the United States puts a tariff on something, the foreign manufacturer might lower prices in order to keep the U.S. selling price the same. In that case, U.S. buyers would still be spending as much as before, but some of the money would be going to our government rather than to the maker of the product.

But that doesn't have to happen! The foreign manufacturer might decide it doesn't mind losing U.S. sales, since there are plenty of other countries to sell to.

Or they might lower prices only partly, so that U.S. prices go up, but not by the whole amount of the tariff.

If someone told you "the other country pays the tariff," meaning the tariff is extracted from the other country without affecting your price, you were deceived. It's that simple. People who know about international business have known how tariffs work all along.

And that is why economists, particularly conservative economists, are almost always against tariffs (with the possible exception of a low tariff on all imports as a way of raising revenue).

It is also why tariffs never make prices go down. At best, prices might not go up by the whole amount of the tariff, if the seller is willing to cut prices. But a tariff is an extra tax on goods coming in, and it's not going to make them cheaper.

Would a 20% sales tax make your groceries cheaper? Even if it pressured Kroger to cut some prices a few percent? Same thing. Now you know.

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Fixing the intercom

Our daughter Cathy and her family live in a house built in 1960 that has an intercom similar to the intercoms in two different houses I lived in as a child. It did not work. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to fix it, although it took me a while to get around to doing the work.

There will be a long video on YouTube about the details of the repair. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek (in lower resolution than the final video will be):

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No astro?

There hasn't been much astrophotography here lately, for two reasons. One is that we have had a remarkable spell of cloudy weather, with only a few clear nights — none of them very clear — since the beginning of June.

The other is that my eyes need some work. I'm getting cataract surgery on August 13 and 27 (one eye at a time).

I've had detectable cataracts for several years, but in the past three years or so they've been making me need frequent changes of eyeglasses, and now the right eye has irregular astigmatism, so it is not in focus with any eyeglass lens. It will be the first one to get its lens replaced. Stay tuned for details.

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