From the new They Might Be Giants kids’ album, Here Comes Science.

Here’s a video that has been on the InterTubes for a while now but it’s a good example of tilt-shifting done properly. Well, almost properly; the helicopter during the rescue should have remained in sharp focus as it was on the same plane as the section of water which was in focus. I also like the fact that it’s sped up a bit as it adds to the feeling of the surreal. Nice song too.

This video gives a reasonably good summary of the content of Peter Singer’s new book, The life you can save – Acting now to end world poverty.

See the book review below.

An interesting experiment would be to play a series of audio clips of various speakers to people whilst monitoring their heart rates. It would be handy to have them also rate the clips on how strongly they agree or disagree with the speaker.

Once the results were in I then wonder if you could use software to analyse the audio and make predictions as to how strongly a person is likely to respond on an emotional level to a particular style of speech.

• Adolph Hitler
• Todd Bentley
• Richard Dawkins
• NT Wright
• EO Wilson
• GW Bush
• David Lange

Here’s an interesting phenomenon. Watch the video through before continuing to read these comments.

Once you’ve watched it through, press replay and close your eyes.

I heard about this on a recent Quirks and Quarks podcast. The talking head is filmed saying “Ga ga ga ga” and is overdubbed with the sound of him saying “Ba ba ba ba”. Because our visual and aural senses work in tandem and our brain is really good at trying to make sense of things we will ‘hear’ the guy on the video saying “Da da da da”. This is true of just about any other kind of illusion. Our brains help us out by pre-rendering things we see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Sometimes our brains can be tricked and this is one of those times.