Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Conspiracy Theories

I just finished watching the conspiracy theorist documentary, “Zeitgeist”.

Much like the show Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? by Fox Television, Zeitgeist makes you feel like the lines between truth and fiction are not so black and white, and even though many of the claims made are far-fetched, or even beyond belief, it still makes for compelling viewing.

From the zeitgeistmovie.com site:

Zeitgeist, produced by Peter Joseph, was created as a nonprofit filmiac [sic] expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used/referenced and the Interactive Transcript includes exact source references and further information.

Now, it’s important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed. For example, some information contained in Part 1 and Part 3, specifically, is not obtained by simple keyword searches on the Internet. You have to dig deeper. For instance, very often people who look up “Horus” or “The Federal Reserve” on the Internet draw their conclusions from very general or biased sources. Online encyclopedias or text book Encyclopedias often do not contain the information contained in Zeitgeist. However, if one takes the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is based on documented evidence. Any corrections, clarifications and further points regarding the film are found on the Clarifications page. Non-Profit DVDs / Free Video Downloads are available through the Downloads page.

That being said, it is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.

From the origins of Christianity to the US government’s involvement in the September 11th attacks to the Rothchild’s attempt to take over the world, this documentary spans most of the conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard about. It even has a take on JFK’s assassination. Surprisingly enough, the moon landing as a hoax didn’t make the final cut.


[Zeitgeist – YouTube]

The Large Hadron Collider

The latest iteration of the world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, will be switched on in May 2008 (though the BBC documentary below says November, the time line has been updated).

It’s big, REALLY big, and expensive—costing over 6 billion dollars and crossing between the borders of France and Switzerland at four points. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories.

As a side note, CERN has had some impressive byproducts, including the web itself.

The BBC created a great documentary about it called The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, the full running time is 49 minutes, but you can enjoy the BBC’s preview:


[The Six Billion Dollar Experiment – YouTube]

The Amazing Intelligent Resize

Currently if you have a large image that you need to make smaller for the web you can either scale it or crop it. Scaling makes everything smaller and cropping can cut out important content. This incredible video demonstrates an image re-sizing algorithm that is content-aware. It’s pretty cool and I figure it’s something that is going to make someone a boatload of money.


[Content Aware Image Sizing – YouTube]

A Night at the Opera

This YouTube clip is of a scene from “A Night at the Opera” with The Marx Brothers. To simulate a foreign language, lines of dialogue that were meant to sound foreign were reversed when the film was originally made. That is, the foreign language is just English played backwards.

It’s not too spectacular, in fact it’s just an honest translation of what the other characters asked him to say but here is the audio I reversed: A Night at the Opera Reversed.

Platform

Platform

Just for fun, the motion graphics fans out there might enjoy the stop action magic of Platform from motiongrapher.com.

“Smith & Foulkes used a Canon Digital SLR camera linked up to a laptop allowing them to capture frames and play them back checking the shots as they went along. By shooting digitally Smith & Foulkes ended up with a much larger image size to work with when compared with the normal 35mm motion picture frame. These frames were then taken into After Effects and Photoshop for a clean-up where people and rigs from shots were removed. A final grade was then added in Flame.”