Assuming my usual place a few years behind the cutting edge of technology, I've finally obtained a digital camera. It likes to chirp at me. Since it has an ungodly number of modern options with cryptic icons and abbreviations, I actually read the manual. Some peculiar excerpts:

On the list of places to avoid using the camera:
"-places subject to direct sunlight"

No nature photography then, I suppose. They also recommend not exposing the IR Remote receptor, which is located on the front of the camera, to bright light. Right.

"The LCD monitor sometimes displays bright, dark, or colored spots at all times. This is not a malfunction. These spots do not appear in the photographed image."

Clearly the definition of 'malfunction' is quickly evolving. I especially like the "at all times" part.

Well I thought there would be more, but that's about it. There is some mild Engrish, the manufacturer being Toshiba, but nothing great. The printing is aligned extremely close to the spine, but that's much more annoying than amusing. It's actually a pretty good manual overall though. So let's talk about something else.

One of the surgeons at my workplace today asked my boss a question that I first thought was foolish, but later considered more carefully. They were talking about how reflection, absorption and transparency work at the molecular level, and the surgeon said "by the way, why when you look in a mirror is the left-right polarity of your body's reflection reversed, but not up-down?" My reflex thought was, there's nothing special about a mirror, it's just the same as if another person is facing you or if you turn around 180 degrees, that your left and right sides are in the opposite places (from someone else's point of view). But then later I thought, well if a person standing and facing you is reversed that way, why don't they also appear flipped vertically (essentially restating the doctor's question)? Then I realized that it's just as simple, because while they are turned 180 degrees horizontally from your orientation, they are not actualy flipped vertically.

My boss's answer to the question was simply that it's a result of the geometry of our eyes. I recalled that since our eyes receive information vertically flipped, with light from above hitting the bottom of the back of the eye, our brains flip the images back at some subconscious level. But with spherical eyes, shouldn't the images be flipped horizontally too? I can't see why not. So then the brain must flip the raw eye images both ways--in other words, rotate them 180 degrees. But in my memory of biology or whatever class this was taught in, only the vertical flipping was mentioned. And in the experiments in which image-flipping glasses were worn and the eyes adjusted after a couple of weeks, I seem to remember that only glasses which flipped images vertically were used. What would happen with horizontally flipping glasses? Probably a lot of car accidents.