Name: DISTORTIONS
Uploaded: 2016-08-13T14:18:26.000Z
Duration: 11 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

distorted. The pixels you are watching have been

Advanced passive voice

time displaced. They've been mapped onto a gradient

and the darker the region they're mapped to, the further behind

they lag. The effect is really fun but it's certainly

Many, many popular digital cameras suffer from lag induced distortion,

unnoticeable. It's called a rolling shutter.

Instead of snapping a full exposure at once

they quickly scan strips of each frame. It's

usually undetectable. But when the subject changes faster than the camera

you get the famous geloey wobbly rolling  shutter effect. Really fast

things, like vibrating guitar strings and airplane propellers,

are famous victims, but people can be too. Luke Mandel submitted this photo

to Boing Boing[.net]. His camera scans left to right and, in this instance,

when the scan began and then open in the reflection scanned a fraction

of a second later. But the rolling shutter effect

is not just a neat curiosity. It represents

a fundamental and inescapable distortion that

affects everything we see. Rolling shutter

or not. First things first, let's talk about distortions.

A hallucination is a distortion of reality

when there is no apparent stimulus. If you are merely

misinterpreting an actual stimulus, that is an illusion.

But some distortions occur before our sense organs

and minds get in the way. They are called

optical phenomena. They are not the result of sensation or perception gone wrong.

Instead, optical phenomena are distortions caused by the mere properties of light

in and of themselves. If you look up at the sky

you are hallucinating. But if you see a flat

two-dimensional connect-the-dots Big Dipper, you are seeing

an illusion. It's an illusion because those dots merely

appear to be on the same plain, like holes poked in the dark roof of the sky.

lightyears apart from one another in three dimensions.

As Celestron's brilliant free real-time 3D visualization of space

shows, from different perspectives, besides our own,

they look a lot less like a dipper or plough.

In fact, all constellations and asterisms

are geocentric illusions. From a wider perspective

that gave them their names. But you can't blame us.

I mean, Earth is the only perspective any human has ever had.

And even Voyager 1, the most distant man-made object,

is still not even close to being far enough away for the constellations to look

even remotely different than they do here on Earth.

It's also not our fault, our eyes' and brains'

fault, that distant, distant stars weren't included

in our early cosmic connect-the-dot game.

If it weren't for red shifting and the inverse square law and light extinction,

distant things could be seen in all their glory.

The night sky would look phenomenal. Many structures

too dim for their hugeness to be appreciated.

When we see Hubble Telescope images of distant objects, like the Helix Nebula,

it's easy to think that, without a telescope to zoom in,

the object must just be a tiny point in the sky.

But in reality, even though the Helix Nebula is

3 lightyears across. If we could make the Helix Nebula

really long exposure of it, we would see the Helix Nebula

as it really is - nearly 70% the apparent diameter

of our Moon. This is a serious picture. That is how large

the Helix Nebula would appear in the night sky from Earth

tiny in the sky, by the way. It's easy to think of the moon as this huge

baseball-sized thing up there in the sky, but that's an illusion.

Try this the next time you see the Moon. Grab a sheet of notebook paper

and you will notice that the angular diameter of the Moon

is the same size as a hole punched in a sheet of notebook paper held

in arms-length away. Seriously, try it sometime. It shows just how

cute and tiny our little moon is. The Orion Nebula

would appear even larger, if we saw all of its light.

a smudge in the sky to our eyes. But if our eyes were better at collecting

dim light, we would see Andromeda's true extent

night sky doesn't look like that. Distant objects

are dimmer, that's a bummer. But light still wins when it comes to speed.

Light travels at the fastest speed. In fact, in a vacuum, light travels

But not really. I mean, not compared to how far apart

things are in the universe. Sydney, Australia

is 1/14th of a light second away from London.

To put that in perspective let's take a light speed journey from London

to Sydney. It would look like this... Ready?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

DISTORTIONS

perspective

matter

cause

reality