Tuesday 30th January 2007

I spent a decent part of this evening staring at the back of someone’s head. I’m not even quite sure whose.

I was watching a very short snippet of a recent BBC documentary charting the progress of climateprediction.net which saw the prominent presence of the front of the head and indeed voice of Dr Nick Faull, one of the scientists working on analysing the data produced. However, if you look past his face and to the right, you will see the back of someone’s head.

It looks just like the back of the head of a friend of mine who worked on climateprediction.net over the summer. This has been commented on by her mum, her brother and her boyfriend (all of whom might be expected to know what the back of her head looks like better even than herself) and also a professor in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics department (who might be expected to know if there was anyone else who looked like her in the atmos department). Pretty compelling so far.

However, she maintains that she wasn’t aware of being sat behind anyone being interviewed (and what with the bizarre lighting they used, a camera kit, production crew and interviewer, you might hope she’d notice). She also doesn’t think she’s ever sat at the computer which the mystery person is at.

I cracked open Photoshop and tried to enhance the sharpness and brightness of the mysterious, dim hair and discovered that it’s held up by some kind of black bobble-thing. We’re not sure if she owns such a hair retention device. She’s also wearing an annoyingly generic black top which pretty much anyone might own. However, the not-quite-brown, not-quite-blonde hair is exactly the right colour…

The next stage is to set up a duplicate of the shot with harsh sidelighting and slight out-of-focus-ness and see if she does indeed look like her bizarre television doppelgänger. Or perhaps the better test would be to set up such a shot without telling her, and see if she’s likely to have not noticed a camera crew sneaking up on her.

Since the documentary was presented by David Attenborough, it is possible that he brought along one of his highly-trained stealth film crews used to stalking lions on the Serengeti and that they interviewed Dr Faull with a camera disguised as a baby rhino and a presenter covered in grassy webbing.

Or maybe that would make her more likely to notice.

Anyway, why not check out the back of someone’s head on YouTube? It’s about a minute and fifteen in. Reward for anyone who knows who the Hell it might be.

 

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