Good morning, John!

Halloween. Haha. *claps* In the spirit of the times, I am dressed up like the mad scientist Dr. Horrible, but John, I’ll tell you what, there’s another reason why I’m dressed up like a mad scientist today and it’s very simple.

I guess Dr. Horrible doesn’t wear glasses, huh? *takes off glasses* Except now I can’t see anything. OK, I’m going to try this without my glasses.

I feel very disoriented. I am also dressed up like a mad scientist because today, everyone watching this is being invited to be part of a scientific experiment. *takes off glove and wipes nose* I gotta wipe the snot off my nose, but I don’t wanna do it with my glove. I’m a runny nose type of guy!

All that talk about how awesome communities can be when they come together to do awesome things has gotten people thinking, and one person, Dr. Susanne Martin, actually contacted me about using the nerdfighters as part of a scientific experiment. Dr.

Martin is studying the interaction between our ears and our eyes, and she’s got this excellent software that tracks the motion of the eyes, and, based on large samples in this study, they can interpolate a lot of different things about how our hearing interacts with our seeing of the world. Now this is really very cool stuff, but what they need is a lot of people participating, and since it’s expensive to get a bunch of people into the lab and doing this stuff, she’s actually figured out a way to sort of outsource that. And so she is outsourcing it today to our community.

I’m—this is awesome, I can’t believe that we are able to help with science right here on YouTube. SCIENCE!!! Dr.

Martin in her conversation with me was a little bit skeptical about the idea that we would get enough videos for a good sample size, but I told her “Do not underestimate the power of this community.” So y’all don’t let me down here. She needs a lot of these, minimum two hundred, preferably like four figures, like a thousand videos. So the rest of this video is going to be the experiment, but what you need to participate is: 1.

A camera, with which you can record yourself, so that the software can track where your eyes are looking, and you will need very simply to watch the rest of this video about a foot away from your monitor. Now you have to have the camera set up so that it can see your eyes moving, so your eyesight camera will work, or if you’re using another camera, set it up so that it can see the whites and blacks of your eyes. It’s all amazingly simple, and once you’re done recording yourself, all you have to do is post the video as a response to this video, and then Dr.

Martin’s research team can download all of that stuff via KeepVid, and then analyze the eye movements with their software. So thus ends the video. Pause right now, get everything set up, start recording, and then press play.

Pause it now. OK, are you back? Are you done setting it up?

If you’re not done setting it up, go set it up. OK, here comes the video. All you have to do is follow the little red dot with your eyes about a foot away from the screen with the YouTube player at either normal or HD size, not full screen. *red dot bounces around screen, then picture of screaming cat with loud noise* MWAHAHAHA!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I apologize. That wasn’t very nice; I totally tricked you.

What do you expect? I’m Dr. Horrible!

You think that the ethics is going to get in the way of the science? OK, it’s not officially science, but we do now have hopefully a very large database of people getting scared by a cat. And I’m very much looking forward to downloading all those videos and writing a song about how I scared you.

So, while we’re not really doing science, we are using the power of community to do something awesome. And what is Halloween without a little bit of fright? John, don’t forget to be awesome. *nerdfighter salute* *video of little girl making nerdfighter salute* *text on screen: Thanks for SUBSCRIBING!*