Tag Archives: Demonstration

Re-Inventing Yourself with Sarah Jones

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Sarah Jones, in her TED talk,  gives a great demonstration on switching identities. When held a (funny) mirror we get a chance to reflect (that’s what a mirror helps to do, right?) on what we do in real life.

Mostly we switch identities without consciously controlling it. When the cop stops us we might go into the little-innocent-boy identity, or when the kid is annoying too much, we play the big nasty bully. Sarah Jones reminded me that this switching of identities can indeed be controlled. I had an early experience with this when a well knows show host and comedian went over a map of Germany and gave a weather report for all the different areas in the appropriate dialect for the area – and there are quite a few for such a small country.

This impressed me so much that I was able to mimic some of the dialects and mannerisms. By doing this for myself I learned that I had to become a person from that area and then it was actually very simple to be credible. I did not get all the dialect-specific words right and probably missed some of the nuances of the dialects but as long as I was a person from that area it worked.

Sarah Jones is definitely a master at that – here she is…

The Power of Thank you Revisited

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A little while back I reported on Laura Trice’s TED talk about the importance and power of thank you, of validation. Delivered right a thank you looks really simple but as with all very true facts it appears so simple yet is often so hard to attain. This talk is a very good demonstration of what it teaches, look at the ease with which Ms. Trice walks the talk at the end. I personally don’t know many people who can blow you away with a simple thank you like she did.

Today another video came across my desk that actually caused me to revisit Ms. Trice’s talk. It delivers the same message in form of a short film and be prepared to be moved…

Photoshop Exposes Optical Illusion

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One of these optical illusions came across my desk again…

optical illusion

which claims that the fields marked A and B have the same gray level. Just looking at the image it is obvious that this could not possibly be. So, normally, the untrained non-scientific mind would push it aside, maybe say, wow, really?! and wander on.

But this is where I came in – a trained scientist! And this scientist now really had enough of this and went on the quest to look for himself.

I started up trusty photoshop, zoomed into an area that contained both the fields A and B, cut a bit out of field A and dragged it next to field B …

optical illusion demonstrated

And what do you know? When the cut out little square from A is right next to field B, it is very clear that they are the same shade of gray – quod erat demimonstrum!

And we still trust our eyes? A little shadow so that the eye ‘thinks’ that the field must be brighter, makes it brighter for the eye. Could not help contemplating how many things there are that I don’t see and how many things I see that are not there.

UPDATE:

I was really surprised that there was so much discussion about this relatively irrelevant subject, but it went even further than somebody even accusing me of cheating. Somebody made a life-action demonstration this this little optical illusion and I just have to share this here: