shurid
pbsJust two days ago I was flipping through channels on my TV and since I got no cable and it was way past midnight nothing good was on. I settled for Channel 13 (local PBS station) where they were showing some old science inventions and the people associated with it. As I was watching the show, I realize they were talking about time-lapse video capture and the camera - how it all works. Then they started talking about this one guy who after his early retirement from his job, started creating time-lapse video of everyday events with his time-lapse video camera - as his hobby as well as his foremost activity. His intention was to capture some well known time-lapse phenomenon like blooming of flowers, movements of starfish across the sea shore or a simple birth of a plant from the seed - all these progressions happens very slowly as they take up days after days and hence the changes are seemingly invisible in human eyes.
Time-lapse video capture, as the term itself suggests takes frame by frame snap-shots or images of a particular event on a specific time interval. This technique of motion capture is very useful in speeding up any tedious, time consuming progression on a screen (i.e the movements of clouds on the sky through out the day). A widely known time-lapse sequences is the growing human embryos, where you can see the embryos morphing into a complete human baby: from start to finish, the whole process which takes about 9 months, can be seen in time-lapse sequence in only 60 seconds! I’m sure you all have seen it on TV at some point (along with many other time-lapse motion videos).
Now, back to the story. As I continued to follow the narration of the show, I soon found out that there’s been some unexpected discovery! That guy who set out to capture some interesting time-lapse video - failed in his experiments (the plant never grew from the seed and the starfish was dead before it’d move) - ended up observing another jaw-dropping phenomenon: arbitrary movement of lifeless objects! The coffee mug that was sitting on the left hand side of the table on one shot moved to the right on a later shot - it all happened in the background while he was trying to capture a different time-lapse experiment on the foreground. I was literally stunned by that point (I’m not kidding! I may be the only person who didn’t know about this up until now *cough* I doubt it *cough* but I won’t deny the fact that I was SHOCKED, intrigued and my eyes glued to the TV screen at that point. May be being a die-hard fan of 'The X Files' and that dark moody environment of my living room at 1:30 am had something to do this chilling effect on me. Who knows.)
So, once he noticed the mug-movement, he decided to shoot some more inanimate, lifeless objects to make sure that wasn’t something exceptional or just plain spooky! And he was astounded to find that in each cases - the mug incident proved constant! The one that was most shocking and literally knocked my socks off was this video of a laundry basket full of laundry cloths: t-shirts, shorts, pants, undergarments and socks - left in the corner of a room for days, untouched, unmoved - started moving all by themselves, like they have lives of their own: the cloths started spreading from the basket, moving arbitrarily everywhere (but never too far from the basket, if one would go far it would come back again near to the basket!). The socks would literally climb up and down the edge of the basket and start moving across on the ground, and later ultimately disappeared from the basket for good! (The whole thing that happened in less then a minute, was unbelievable. You have to see it to believe it!) Once its been proven by time-lapse motion capture that inanimate objects can move over a long period of time, the guy who conducted this experiments named this phenomenon ...now here’s where I need you guys to help me...I forgot the what its called. I just know its named after his late father. And since he was Chinese the name goes something like “Mao Sung Motion” or something like that. I forgot. Anyone out there who knows about it kindly let me know. I’d like to learn more about this phenomenon as to what exactly causes this sort of thing to happen (I have some idea but that's not good enough).
Oh, and one more thing. It turned out that this applies to living objects too - as later on the show they showed how that guy’s elder son; who’d been apparently set out to spend the rest of his life sitting still on the couch, staring at the TV (he had some sort of psychological problem or something, It wasn’t clear to me what exactly was wrong with him.) - left mark of his physical movements and interaction with other object in the room during the whole time that he claimed he didn’t move an inch from the couch! And not surprisingly later we see in the time-lapse video, his body indeed moved from the couch and just like those wondering socks from the laundry basket - his body had been dragged all by itself down to the ground and across the floor in a way that suggests it was involuntary. The boy himself didn’t have any recollection of it, nor did he seem to be aware of it during the movements. Spooky! Isn't it?
Now I will leave you guys with the show’s title and air date - if it helps in anyway to find me the name of this peculiar type of non-voluntary motion.
Show: Colorvision
Air date: Jan. 12, 2004 (late night)
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