Killing Time/cyclists.

I have lots of time the kill at the moment as some of you might have noticed from my increasingly worthless postings.
So to kill some time I was playing around with some ideas to do with, amongst other vaguely relevant cycling safety(ish) things, saccading eyes, blind spots and dead cyclists.

We have all read the reports here and over on places like Movingtargetzine.com (do you put a full stop if a website address ends a sentence?)

9 cyclists killed in London 2007 by goods vehicles.

Another London cyclist under a left-turning lorry

Effri and Chewy run over by lorries in the same day

. . . . and so on.

I was looking at the blind spot we all have in our vision - for those of you who don't know where this is - there is basically a 'hole' in your field of view (well actually two, one on each eye) a spot where you can see absolutely nothing, not a small black spot or blurry area but a sizable circle to the outside of each eye that is devoid of vision - you tend not to notice it because most of the time (and this might seem obvious) you can't see it - like I say it is not black, dark, light or blurry - it is just an area of nothingness. (it is where the optic nerve meets your retina). There might be a proper term for it, but I don't know what that might be so I will just call it the 'blind spot'

If you close one eye - let's for arguments sake say your left eye - and view the world only with your right eye (this is done only for the purposes of illustrating where the blind spot is - it is always there regardless of whether the other eye is closed or not) - the area would look something like this illustration below - you can see above, below, right and left of the blind spot but not within it's area.

Now obviously I can't draw an area of nothingness so I have painted it grey. But of you want to see a real one have a look here.

http://www.mdsupport.org/map/map.html

[EDIT:] Try JDBs version, works much better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_%28vision%29

Or put your thumb out in front of you at arms length - close your left eye - fix your right eye on something in the distance (a light switch or any other stationary object) - and whilst keeping your right eye fixed on the object slowly move your thumb to the right - at some point your thumb will disappear - carry on slowly moving it right- it will then reemerge on the other side of your blind spot.

Ok, with me so far, we have a big hole on the left and right of our vision which we can see around but never within.

I wondered if this might sit in an unfavorable place when you are sat in a lorry with regards to a vehicle with such a small head on profile as a bike.

This is the part where I do my highly speculative and very unscientific test. Not having a lorry to hand I set up a chair, a mirror and a bike, roughly in the positions you might find in a typical truck/bike bone cruncher scenario, staring straight ahead and using various household implements to track my blind spot, I was surprised to find that my bike could be made to completely disappear fairly easily from the point of view of the truck driver (me on a chair).

Of course, as pointed out above, this would not be visible to the driver as the area is not dark or blurry but simply 'gone' with nothing to alert you of the missing area (how many of us notice the two missing areas in our field of view).

Of course there are endless variables to factor in, but as a basic idea I came to the conclusion that we just might not be (figuratively) invisible to truck drivers, but, in part at least, actually invisible ?

Whadyathink ?