Bird Head Tracking

Hey, it's me Destin, and uh, yesterday I made a video about chicken head tracking and a chicken's ability to keep his head stabilized as his body moves. He keeps it in one spot.

Well, a very unfortunate thing happened today on my way home. Unfortunately, I hit a bird, and that's what UHD s's trying to tell you right now. You see, you're looking at the bird. So I have here a purple martin. Yes, ma'am, Bird, that's right—s's telling you it's a bird.

So here's a purple martin, and uh, his left wing unfortunately is hurt. Daddy? Yes, ma'am. Daddy? Yes, Bird, that's right. This is a bird, and his left wing's hurt. I believe we're going to try to nurse him back to health.

But uh, anyway, as I was holding him—sit down, baby, thank you—as I was holding him, I noticed he has the same head tracking ability as the chicken, only a little bit different. Watch, I'll try to hold him as stationary as I can. He's hurt on my finger; he's a lot smaller, so it's really hard to do. But you can see he does have some form of head tracking.

I'm just not very good at showing you this. But anyway, in humans we have three mutually orthogonal roll rate sensors in our ears, and um, these guys—I don't know what they have, but I'm assuming it's something very similar.

Sad? Can you say m ually orthogonal? M? Yes, that's right, one more time—say, can you look at the camera and say mutually orthogonal? Mutually orthogonal! That's right.

Yeah, she's working on differential equations, so we'll work on the orthogonality issue. But anyway, I see a mosquito on this thing, so I'm going to go ahead and sanitize my hands so we don't get West Nile virus and I don't drop my my child.

You gone? You going to go see Mommy? Okay, she's lost interest with the bird. But anyway, head tracking—you can see the mosquito on his head, and uh, don't tell Tara, she was having a fit that I was even holding this thing.

So head tracking, it works! Get rid of those mosquitoes. Alrighty, so bye.