Intelligence Increase

Disclaimer: what's left unsaid

2011-12-05T13:24:00.016Z

In conjuring adverts, you will often see a list of methods not used, designed specifically to divert magicians, who will read a description of the trick and start speculating. "Probably magnets..."

* NO magnets!

"Well, invisible thread, then..."

* No threads!

And so on, until the magician gives up, and spends the money just to find out about this

*entirely NEW principle!

UNLESS, he can think of something they didn't mention, which might just work...

Similarly, magicians on public television will often have to run off a list of disclaimers, otherwise (not being a live audience) the public may dismiss the effect all too easily. So they have to say "No cuts! No camera tricks! No stooges! No actors!" before even getting to the magic. We've all seen far too many amazing film special effects these days.

AND YET, they still need to have a method of achieving the effect, of course. You might be able to figure it out by spotting what they DIDN'T say - just like advertising and political speeches, performers consider it important that they didn't actually lie. There were no cuts or camera tricks when the Statue of Liberty disappeared, for instance.

Keith Barry & Hypnotism

I have recently caught Keith Barry on tv, doing the Derren Brown Schtick, including what may appear to you as morally dubious hypnosis tricks (instant inductions on random passers-by looks pretty like mugging to me) - getting their permission afterwards seems odd, too, as when will they know they have their free will and judgement back? When will they trust a stranger?

Having said that, such shows have to induce paranoia in the audience to prove effective (the Black Ops programme specifically appeals to all the conspiracy theory/MKULTRA/mind manipulation stuff, for instance). The fact that mentalists (as opposed to magicians) blur the area between conjuring tricks and tricks of the mind leaves one wondering...

As Dunninger used to say "For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice."

So naive punters will think the blindfold drive another and inexplicable trick of the mind, but people who know the trick, and also may think of hypnosis as predominantly social compliance, peer pressure, participant selection, suggestion, etc. might suspect that the hypnosis demonstrated may also have a couple of unmentioned tricks - for instance, to say 'no actors' are involved does not eliminate the possibility of stooges (whether 'instant stooges' - people invited to play along - or hired hands), being employed. Or of using people who have already, and previously, been hypnotised, so that one simple trigger can put them back under.

I don't want to go into that debate, right now, but check out Martin Taylor's site, about his show Hypnotism Without Hypnosis which so impressed Derren Brown. And Derren himself keeps that 'mentalist' ambiguity going by claiming to "combine magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship in order to seemingly predict and control human behaviour..."

Anyway, judge for yourselves - this is Keith Barry on the TED conference, he's certainly amusing.

Disclaimers

And as to those disclaimers, they are so familiar to magic shoppers that they have become almost a joke - look at Penguin Magic:

No mirrors!
No wax!
No chemicals!
No magnets!
No wires!
No strings!
No counting!
Not a stacked deck!
Not a marked deck!
Not a peek!
Not a pull!

Are We Live?

Penn & Teller forgetting to mention something important...

A future in magic

2011-05-20T21:03:00.006+01:00

Unlike juggling, which you can do purely for your own pleasure - as a meditation, a sport, a challenge to oneself, a pastime - magic doesn't really happen until you perform it and share it - just like acting - and elicit a response.

Of course, some jugglers do it as a social activity, but I never got far into passing and those patterns. I tried it, but remained mostly a solo juggler.

I say this because I have entirely stopped performing, and couldn't really even do you an impromptu trick if challenged, although I remember some stuff which still pops out occasionally (from origami to finger tricks).

However, I do seem to carry on reading the literature of magic (I love ingenuity) and watching it when I can, and can occasionally even fall for buying something online, just because I can!

Recently I got a boxed set of Lennart Green (the Master File), not only to watch the performances, but to have him analyse and explain, and it is a delight to find that (skilled though he is) he remains predominantly a great entertainer. Some of his skills are high level, of course, but much of his material remains accessible (shall we say 'intermediate skills', at least in the card specialist world).

but what a charming show!

Re-kindling my interest in magic

2010-12-20T12:26:00.002Z

Slowly but surely my hard drives have filled up with PDFs. E-books, articles, downloads, all sorts.

And I don't read them on the big screen that much...especially books (I can manage an article).

So I invested in a Kindle (I've been watching their development for a while) and not so much for buying from Amazon (although that may happen occasionally) but to upload all my PDFs (and most of them are magic related) so I can get through them on the bus, etc. The screen is not back-lit, so it works like paper on the eyes (you need light to read in bed, and the cover contains a little pop-out light).

Currently enjoying The Pageboy Speaks, which I got from Lybrary as a PDF. These columns from Pabular seem really evocative, even though I was never a regular reader, or even a good or serious magician (I used close-up to supplement my juggling/clowning stuff).

Still, I met Pat Page on several occasions in Davenports, and although he could be a wind-up, he was a great performer and salesman. Some of the stuff he mentions sparks memories of my times in the magic club of my youth (when I did take it pretty seriously) like seeing presentations to the club by Ron McMillan, or David Berglas, etc. And I saw a lot of live acts, good, bad and indifferent. These are the days before video and DVD, so if you caught something on tv you were lucky!

Damn everything but the circus!

2010-12-12T16:30:00.005Z

"damn everything but the circus!
...damn everything that is grim, dull
motionless, unrisking, inward turning,
damn everything that won't get into the circle,
that won't enjoy,
that won't throw its heart into the tension,
surprise, fear and delight
of the circus,
the round world
the full existence...
damn everything but the circus!"

e.e.cummings

PARKLIFE
Parklife Brighton 2010

Parklife Brighton 2010

nofitstate - Inside Out Roundabout (Swindon 2008)

Norfolk and Norwich Festival - No Fit State Circus

Air Ball - NoFit State Circus at Maumbury Rings, Dorchester 2010

NoFit State Circus Parklife Taunton

NoFit State Parklife 2010

Parklife in Progress - NoFit State's residency at The Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre in Taunton

Parklife - No Fit State Circus at Brighton - coming to Dorchester in September 2010

nofitstate circus parklife (official)

Now.Here

Now.Here

Tabu

NoFit State Premiere Montreal

Tom Interview

Tohu Press Call
Tabu on Daily Motion
Tabu
Uploaded by nofitstate. - Arts and animation videos.

Performers – Creative Team

Ali Williams Creative Director

Lynn Carroll Community Development Officer

James Roberts - Circus Performer

Paul Evans - Circus Performer

Kevin McIntosh - Circus Performer
Anna Sandreuter - Circus Performer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnSCDrynZSk

Appropriate Title
Recent footage from newcastle and my trip to norwich with nofitstate circus

Tent up – Time Lapse

Nofitstate Circus Timelapse Cardiff WMC

Up Up and Away
NoFit State Circus Oval Basin Time Lapse

Miscellaneous Acts

counterweighted aerial hoop act
Shaena and Barnz Counterweight act from NoFitstate Circus Immortal show.

unicycle ballet

Stunt jump

Newspaper articlesHowie Morley in The Guardian

Jeni Williams' article for New Welsh Review, issue 68, 2005 - "Circus with Heart"

And talking of Show Biz - and entertainment...

2010-10-27T21:30:00.000+01:00

And of course, many of these technicians don’t yet have the other bit – performance – where you can take essentially simple (uncomplicated, not easy!) stuff and actually entertain people!

I was juggling in Stomu Yamashta’s Red Buddha show when we got to Switzerland, and went out one evening to see Kris do this act in front of 4000 people – then had to go back and do my act. He had so much CONTACT with the audience!

Unusually enough, in this modern world of individuals, Kris got his act from his dad Bela, and if you got lucky you might have seen them doing synchronised juggling (I got stoned and I missed it , at some convention or other!) Here they do cigar boxes.

Chinese juggling acts have always depended on direct transmission of exact routines and moves, rather than what we call ‘creativity’. Both have their values. Hats and balls – all together now...

One beautiful body language tribute to W.C.Fields in there – the man who didn’t just out-juggle people, but added the CHARACTER to juggling...technique appeals to jugglers (geeks, maybe) but character and humour and contact appeals to ‘normal people’.

And, again, he did this stuff in his youth, but took one last chance (when the movies arrived) to film some highlights for posterity (that’s you and me) at the age of 54! And this they call an alcoholic. Go figure.

I stole more from this routine than from all the technicians...I had to really work hard (no DVDs, no internet, no repeat viewings) when I glimpsed these movies in specialist cinemas... If you think this stuff is easy, just try balancing a stick on your foot for a while, then kick it to the other foot, with a spin. See you in a year.

Extremely Extreme - Twice Nightly

2010-10-27T19:55:00.008+01:00

As a kid I did do a lot of card stuff, but never got beyond basic sleights, really, as I liked ingenuity so I could concentrate on the performance, etc.

Later in life I got into juggling instead, and helped spread that craze far and wide, in the process generating students who far outshone me, and meeting people from other cultures who simply blew me away.

So the combinations you find in XCM (extreme card manipulation) profoundly impress and delight me, but I no longer have any desire to spend the time necessary to actually do that stuff. If you have no idea what I mean, look at Penguin Magic's demo video of the recent champions doing their thing.

It's come a long way from whenI saw Channing Pollock (live!) with his elegant moves...this vid starts with basics and ends with Freestyle!

Who was Channing Pollock I hear some people think... aw...

And of course, he didn't do it competitively, he just made a good living all over the world!

OK, OK, one serious flash at 2:50, but hey, he did this onstage...tv can be as cruel to card magicians (not XCM manipulators) as it used to be to ventriloquists!

Before all that was Geoffrey Buckingham, and I even saw Ron Macmillan do his award-winning billiard ball routine (YouTube doesn’t have everything, we didn’t always record everything back then!)

And, before my time, but much imitated, Welshman Cardini started the whole thing with his slightly tipsy Gent returning from a night out (makes sense of cards, cigars, billiard balls), as amused and confused by what is happening as we are. If you have ever been that drunk or stoned, you will empathize! An actor, not just a bunch of tricks...

Jeff McBride talking about it all

Of course, people filmed this from their Black and White tv, so you have to live with the quality of this 3 minutes

If you can bear it, here’s nine minutes

Not to put down the moderns, with great equipment and more time on their hands, but I remember being at a juggling convention when Karl-Heinz Zeithen showed some scratchy old video of Rastelli and Francis Brunn (also an acrobat and ‘flamenco’ mover), and these old films got standing ovations from a whole room full of jugglers...Here’s Francis with the great Jack Benny (making juggling ‘interesting’)

Here’s Francis (no embedding, but a clearer video - follow link to YouTube) in1969, at the age of about 47 – and remember this guy didn’t get one good take in front of his home video (after 100 takes) he did this stuff TWICE NIGHTLY.

Go practice....

Magic Show

2010-07-30T10:17:00.004+01:00

The latest touring show from the Hayward Gallery in London - Magic Show - has reached my city.

It definitely sounds like it covers the area of crossover I find so interesting (magic, art and magick). Here's a quick summary from their website:

Magic for some invites the creative agency of fantasy and illusion; for others it signals a licence to practice deception. Curated by Jonathan Allen & Sally O'Reilly, Magic Show considers both these approaches, taking fiction and trickery to be interwined, historically prevalent and culturally pivotal. The exhibition demonstrates how artists adopt the perception-shifting ploys of the theatrical magician to summon wonderment whilst simultaneously performing critique, but also reveals how strategic illusion and misdirection can be employed in more ominous contexts.

Before I have even gone to see the exhibition (and accompanying cabaret) this has led me off down unusual research paths to the Centre for Tactical Magic and their Ultimate Jacket.

At the earliest stages of research, it became apparent that private investigators, magicians, and ninjas all used secret pockets in their day-to-day activities. This discovery led the Center for Tactical Magic to develop the Ultimate Jacket, an inconspicuous, yet stylish, garment concealing no less than fifty secret pockets. Designed to hold a vast array of useful items for every day interdiction, the Ultimate Jacket is made from an abrasive-resistant, non-reflective, breatheable, waterproof material. Fully reversible with removable sleeves, the Ultimate Jacket is the perfect complement for any tactical operation, emergency situation, or social occasion.

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants

2009-03-23T20:38:00.005Z

Ricky Jay remains one of the greatest card men. He also turns up as an actor in all sorts of interesting places, from Deadwood, to Dylan's promo for Love and Theft.

I loved him when I saw him on chat shows, at the peak of card throwing, and all that. Hilarious and wild and witty.

Thanks to Internet, I can now watch a serious of mind-bending routines that I never had the privilege to see before. If you think card tricks are boring - check this guy out!

Ricky Jay on Wikipedia
Secrets of the Magus - interview

Card Control

Watermelon - Cards as Weapons

Cups and Balls - a complete routine of all variations

Arsenio tv appearance
3 Card Trick etc

Cowboys - and gambling

Bottom dealing - card mechanic tricks revealed (or at least, displayed!

Astounding Card Trick

4 queens 3 ways

RJ Finds a card

Over and Out

2009-01-03T01:40:00.006Z

I have looked at some of Ben Mack's projects, even though I have nothing to sell. He seems to have used, or dabbled in, a lot of the tools I have used. However, I have never turned around million dollar advertising campaigns. I barely make a living, but then again, you could say the same of Buddhist monks ("what! just one bedroll, a razor, a book and a begging bowl - what a loser mentality!") Or British diffidence.

I joined assorted mailing lists of his, followed him into a coupla websites, etc.

The whole crossover between magic and magick remains interesting, and I have received newsletters from Jeff McBride's school for some time - so it did amuse me when the two suddenly came together. Not that I can get to the "ESP boot camp" but you can get a glimpse of student reaction in this blog (for instance)

For more on Jeff McBride, Eugene Berger, etc check out The Secret Art Journal among the links down the right hand side...Or for their store, look at Your Magic

How do they DO that?

2008-08-31T17:09:00.003+01:00

...or WHY do they do that?

When I was a kid I got into magic because of the cross-indexing of optical illusions, paradoxes, psychology, hypnotism, magnets, gizmos, ingenuity, mnemonics, numbers, symbols, etc.
The thing of puzzling, amusing or amazing people came later.

I never really developed a ‘magician’ persona, although I went through phases of doing tricks for people, and when I became a comedy juggler I used my magical knowledge to add supplementary surprises to my street act. But I never had to decide whether to be ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ – to act like a bank manager with his hobby in a bar (so many magicians seemed like that back in the 50s) or completely nutty like Ali Bongo – who dressed and acted like a cartoon character. Then there was the genius of incompetence – Tommy Cooper – but the act depended on your having seen too many bad magicians, really.

Now we have laid-back stoned enigmas like David Blaine, Las Vegas glam like David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy, sub-punk rockers like Criss Angel the MindFreak, and elegant mindfuckers like Derren Brown (quintessentially British, and my favourite of that bunch – for asserting scepticism, while demonstrating wild talents). From the USA only Penn and Teller continue to entertain AND demystify at the same time, like him.

Although this remains a cultural stereotype, many Americans do seem to take themselves seriously – and if you combine that with lowered ability for critical analysis you end up with celebrity worship, extreme gullibility and hysteria. Just watch how the crowds respond (even if they are a claque or entourage of stooges) to Criss Angel walking on water…or floating in the air…if you want to see how easily you could become a fundamentalist healer, psychic superstar, etc. Having said that, I feel sure that if I flicked through channels to the lowbrow tv stations I could see much the same style of presentation.

So anyway. Having looked at some of Criss Angel’s stuff, I came across Trickbusters and they made me laugh. They are not magicians exposing tricks – just sceptics thinking things through. Now among magicians giving secrets away is the first ‘sin’. Most magicians dislike expose’s like The Masked Magician – but really those shows only give away lame old tricks that you could find in a book in your library. And anyway they make the mistake of thinking the method is the secret.

Usually, the ‘method’ seems too simple. Many audiences (if told how they got fooled) end up feeling stupid or insulted (only occasionally do they feel impressed by the ingenuity and hard work).

So people who can’t figure things out for themselves probably don’t like smart-ass people who tell them how dumb they are. Or, like my sister, don’t want to know, as they enjoy the illusion better.

So watch a bit of Criss Angel hysteria on YouTube, then give TrickBusters a shot – even if they have lower production values.

And if you haven’t figured out how some of those bigger stunts get done, and DO want to know, then the Internet offers lots of channels of research for the ingenious. For instance, the Copperfield estate has pulled all the Trickbuster’s analysis of the flying illusion (using copyright vid) – as it is (quite rightly) Intellectual Property. I don’t deny that, and still want artists and designers to get properly rewarded. Still, the internet ‘library in the sky’ change everything. The designer of the flying illusion took out a patent (against Copperfield’s wishes) so you can find all the working details online. You have to remember that Special Effects started in theatre (Peter Pan flew when I was a child in live theatre) so there is little new about all this. Magicians back in Houdini’s days used to spy on each other, poach mechanics, get very paranoid about who got backstage, etc.

With film and television we have become more aware that we can witness the apparently impossible, so the ‘live studio audience’ or the passers-by, have become important. It doesn’t mean that tv magicians don’t lie to you!

Sometimes it is just a subtlety that impresses me as a researcher. Theatrical flying usually only involved one or two cables, and even if you could see them you ‘suspended you disbelief’ for the plot (Peter Pan wasn’t a magic show, but a play). The real sneaky difference with Copperfield simply lies in using a cobweb of thin wires – to give the same strength and security without a thick cable to disguise (by lighting or airbrushing out, etc). That gossamer thin support network leaves me gasping at human ingenuity, and I can return to watch the flying illusion to watch how beautifully Copperfield sells it as a dream of flying.

Bear in mind, for all the disputes and discussions, the artistry involved remains the key, and the engineering merely a ‘means-to-an-end’ – although to my mechanic friends the machine might seem more interesting that the ‘poof with the Las Vegas smile’ who just has to act clever…

This comes from the professional's point-of-view - Zigmont Backstage

Basically speaking magic is at four levels. The first might be called a trickster, that all he does, a trick. I fooled you he might say. Your uncle at a backyard barbecue doing a card trick.

Then there is a conjurer, a conjurer not only fools people, he fools them completely. He creates a perfect mystery. A conjurer adds no poetry no sense of wonder. He may buy magic at the local magic shop.

The next level, a magician of the first order, he adds poetry to the mystery. He works with ordinary looking objects. His effects are very beautiful in style. He knows the reason why each effect he has produced has been successful.

The final category is of a very high calibre magician. He deceives in an entertaining way. Amazes through his personality, showmanship and technique. That's when the handling of the illusions produce a thrill of genuine surprise in all who behold it. He never wastes a single movement on stage.

A master magician is he who can produce original effects and understand how to present them in an original and convincing manner. His mastery was due to an innate sense of the principles that he studied. He has made the difficult moves look easy, then the easy became beautiful and the beautiful looks like real magic.

Backstage Boys

Zigmont design and produce illusions, SFX, corporate events, etc. They offer this list of books for anyone who seriously wants to study illusion work.

Jim Steinmeyer designs theatrical illusions, writes great books (both technical and popularist) and has a fascinating website. You can find most of these addresses in my permanent links on the right.

John Gaughan designed the flying rig, remains enigmatic and reclusive - his patent can be found at the US Patent listings - Patent # 5,354,238

I'll leave you to trawl through YouTube. It contains some truly dire homemade magical videos, but also some real treasures. I don't mind kids in their bedroom sharing fumbling videos of their card magic practice - but if you really want to learn stuff, turn to the professionals, and lay out a bit of cash.

My find of the night, however? Video of Lennart Green. Amazing and hilarious! (possibly the greatest card mechanic in the world).

Dealing cards into a laser beam where they disappear. (!)

Nine minutes on Spanish television

Here's 3 minutes without interpreter!

The Great FLYdini

2008-08-09T01:05:00.003+01:00

I have a real soft spot for Johnny Carson - I like most people with a magical background (I love the episode of him embarrassing Uri Geller, for instance, by introducing real controls of the props...)

And Steve Martin, back in the days, was truly hilarious - here he is (drawing on his own magical background) as the Great Flydini - it had me on the floor the first time I saw this...

An intriguing event

2008-08-05T21:22:00.002+01:00

Sunshine just sent me a link to this fascinating event.

http://medialab-prado.es/

Dates: October 10 through 24, 2008
Application deadline: August 31, 2008

Anyone into magic and technology might wanna give it a visit. I won't be getting to Peru (!) but I love these kind of links.

Introduction

This new edition of Interactivos? is inspired by the strategies of magic and illusion, in order to harness some of the old and new technological resources to collectively build software pieces and interactive installations which can propose a rethinking of the usual scenario in magic tricks, marked by a very clear separation between the wizard and the spectators.
Magic and illusion have always gone hand in hand with technology; from mechanical illusions, optical and mirror tricks, through the incorporation of electricity and the filmed image, to digital technology: augmented reality, reactive objects, reality hacking and immersive spaces.
This open call follows the one celebrated with the same title in Madrid in 2007 and suggests to broaden the topic Magic and Technology through the exploration of the meanings of the magic concept within the local context of Peru.
Through a programme of reflection, research and production, Interactivos?'08 ' Magic and Technology's goals are:
· To propose magic and illusion as an approach for experiments on perception and attention, behaviour and social relationships.
· To propose a critical viewpoint on the seduction of technology and its application on the spectacle as a tool of persuasion and control.
Teachers summoned for the management of the workshop are acknowledged experts in the fields of the developing, application and spreading of open software and open hardware in creative processes and have also a long experience in the educational field and in the management of workshops.

Hip-ocrisy

2008-06-19T02:09:00.003+01:00

What fun to see the Brits introduce a law that insists that 'psychics, mediums and clairvoyants, etc' have to add disclaimers to their publicity, to say that what they do is 'entertainment and not scientifically proven', and exempting the churches.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7351199.stm

Ancient discussions with very smart people

2008-03-07T00:59:00.019Z

When the Maybe Logic Academy opened I suddenly found people who either thought like me, or at least thought about the same sort of things, and were willing to listen to me rant...

Those original forums disappeared into the void (MLA is currently in its 4.0 incarnation) and I certainly want to rescue some of my own words from those days (rather than think it all through again) but some of it might not make sense without the other people's contributions. I'll try to get their permission, but will take it on trust for now (easy enough to remove them, as what I am about to post is more or less a monologue or soliloquy). some of the formatting may have changed, a bit...

Probably Random

Author Message: bogusmagus Newbie
Joined: Jul 23, 2004
Posts: 474
Location: Splott, Caerdydd, Wales, UK
Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2004 11:47 am
Post subject: Probably Random

We were talking numbers in the chatroom - and about coincidences, and what makes them synchronicities. Though I have had my numerological phases, I lean this way:

Randomness is quite a counter-intuitive concept. If you try to write a random sequence of numbers you may find your own preferences emerging. Even if you manage to avoid 'favourite' numbers you will probably avoid sequences like 777777 or 123456 because they don't 'look random' - whereas a truly random sequence (if there is such a thing) must contain those as well, otherwise there is a pattern of NEVER doing that, (i.e. if you got 123 it would be worth betting the next number will NOT be a 4.)

Quote:
Here's Paul Watzlawick, from How Real is Real (Confusion, Disinformation, Communication)

All right, we say, but real random series must exist, and what we mean by 'real' is that such series are free of any internal order...there is now general agreement among most mathematicians that such a series does not and cannot exist. The essence of randomness, writes G.Spencer Brown in his beautiful little book Probability and Scientific Inference:

has been taken to be absence of pattern. But what has not hitherto been faced is that the absence of one pattern logically demands the presence of another. It is a mathematical contradiction to say that a series has no pattern; the most we can say is that it has no pattern that anyone is likely to look for. The concept of randomness bears meaning only in relation to the observer; if two observers habitually look for different kinds of pattern they are bound to disagree upon the series which they call random.

Improbable things must happen if the sequence is 'truly' random. It may feel strange to be the croupier when the roulette comes up Red 12 times in a row (and both the punters and the casino are going to want an investigation!) but it does happen, has happened, must happen without any trickery or imperfect tools. It may also feel strange to be one of a group of four people who fairly shuffle a pack, cut it, and then deal out four hands each containing a full suit (Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds). Pretty freaky.

If I was one of the four the others would say "It's one of your conjuring tricks"; if it was a high stakes game, knives might be drawn; if you are into drugs you'd all be going "weeeeird!" and I guess if you are into the occult you think "it's a message". Well, it could be a trick, a con, or a message, but it doesn't have to be. Occam's razor and all that. So when does it become really significant? When you had just been talking about such things? When it's the second time this week?

Wildly improbable things must happen. If you don't win the lottery you think ruefully "Well, I guess it was a 14 million to one shot" and tear up the ticket. But someone won this and every week…and they beat those odds.

The history of gambling is not just full of attempts to avoid conscious cheating (which has to skilfully simulate randomness to evade detection, while bending the odds). More importantly, the casino operator has to get as close as possible to randomness (an unpredictable next throw, roll or deal).

A simple example can be found in dice. A die (singular) has to be perfectly cubic, with no bias. If you paint the numbers on, then the six dot side will be slightly heavier, and the number one will tend (over a long series of throws) to end up at the top. (Numbers on opposite surfaces always add up to seven, by the way). If you drill out the numbers, the 6-side will be lighter than the 1-side and 6 will tend to end up at the top. So, look at a Vegas dice - it is drilled out, and then the paint they put in makes up the weight of the missing plastic. I am not kidding.

Quote:
Randomness is unbeatable.

Synchronicity was a new word invented to describe things that did not (appear to) have causal connections. Acausal Orderedness. Synchronicity has as its essential feature 'meaningfulness'. Causality and synchronicity can be understood as opposed but complementary methods of viewing life and events.

Quote:
Serendipity favours the prepared mind.

BogusMagus sig: "Counterpoints of anthropologists in less specialized cultures include shamans, tricksters, clowns and kind-fools. These figures, like professional anthropologists, doubt the absoluteness of their own culture."

ZenPunkist Newbie
Joined: Aug 31, 2004
Posts: 166
Location: Blackhole, CA
Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 9:33 pm

I get bothered by that - discovering the depth of the program that operates my being. Can I really do anything randomly that wasn't programmed on a level I'm unaware of?
I guess that's why the whole order/disorder absurdity thing works - how do you know you weren't ordered to commit a certain act of disorder to maintain a larger order . . . disturbing. I guess the opposite could be just as true though . . . comforting. Aaah

bogusmagus
Post subject: sorry 'bout writing/ranting at length...

...just in passing, though, having started on coincidence/synchronicity - cards and dice were invented as unpredictable randomizing devices - so we can have fun betting on outcomes, testing our ability to estimate probabilities - or 'the odds'. We insist that they must be accurate reproducers of 'the random' otherwise it is called cheating (making it unfairly predictable for sombunall participants).

We describe unusual patterns or outcomes as 'runs of luck' of different kinds. Although we don't actually allow cheating, we do allow 'will-power' and 'wishing-very-hard' magic and 'praying' to influence the outcome. If you can do telekinesis or have a god that really can interfere then, to me, you are cheating and spoiling the game.

I find it interesting that the very same randomizers (cards, dice, tossed coins) whose sequences most of us accept really don't have any 'significance', or predictable quality, are also used for divination, and 'meaningful' use. If we accept that there is nothing more than probability going on, then we know the events and sequences can only be something for us to project onto.

Synchronicity appears to be attributing meaning to stuff that merely occurs at random - whatever that means. Or we use it to describe projections matching up with reality (the self-fulfilling prophecy, at times?)

I like a random universe, with fluctuating and emergent patterns (some of them make me laugh out loud, others make me curse my 'fate', when I am feeling superstitious) - and I don't seem to need any outside influences - no gods, no magical powers, no special privilege - to explain what happens. Good Luck and Bad Luck balance out in the end. And if they don't I look for the human element - the trickster, hustler, charlatan, cheat or con.

ZenPunkist
Post subject: Synchronicity!!

We're so in similar trips right now!!

I was just at a party last night telling someone that the only thing I believe in is uncertainty, & I still have a few doubts about that. They were arguing that they depend on certainty since they're into studying money trends - and we were able to agree that one could guess at the probability of occurrences but still never attain certainty as long as entropy continues to exist. It was great . . . I wrote down the RAW website & a few books on a dollar bill for him to read into (tying in both our interests . . . I might as well be a freak'n politician).

And then - you talk about the trickster figure - and I've been writing so much on that . . . I think tricksters breed shamans (by encouraging free individual thought rather than reliance on truth or "THE WORD" to come from a credible figure), shamans then breed followers (they try to show others the truth instead of encouraging them to think for themselves), then the shamans & followers together breed more tricksters - who try to correct the 'following' defect that occurs in humanity - only to create more shamans. But I guess it takes all kinds to keep the game interesting (just like dice & cards, right?).

So many a days/nights, I eat some shrooms, walk into town by myself, & engage random people in little trips that disturb their certainty & become entropy within the human form - a trickster - It's amazing how offset people become just at the idea that a random stranger would approach them. Screw them!! I figure, you can't get offended when the Giant Russian Tortoises start humping, moaning, & thudding in front of your kid at the zoo . . . cause . . . you're at the zoo to see nature & that's what nature does. And the whole universe is a zoo - so screw all who are so uppety that they get offended by nature!!

Great talking with you! I'm glad probability brought our streams of conscious together. . . . though I'd never place a bet on where they'd go from here!

Vampigato

say zen, how do u start those mind blowing (i assume they appear mind blowing to ur "victims") conversations of yours?? i'd like to try it some time, but since i've been much of an introvert all my life and more recently i no longer care much for the usage of words, i have no god damned idea what to say...

bogusmagus
Post subject: I love this stuff

Hi ZP
it sounds like a great pass-time! I speak as someone who wanted to carry on with my crazy shit and still be acceptable enough not to get locked up, back in the mind-blown days of the 60s and early 70s.

I turned into a street performer, back when that was not a profession - it meant I could go out dressed colourfully, and then act 'crazy' and get paid for it (hopefully). It kept me going for years, without having to get a 9-5 job - I got enough work as a (socially acceptable) Court Jester, and Fool, and Clown - I even got paid to run workshops - it was great!

That was when I started looking up Trickster (possibly my favourite 'god' or archetype).

fuzzbuddy

Here's the kinda thing you could do Vampigato.
BATMAN: Go up to a total stranger in the street and say "Hello, I'm Batman". When they look totally bewildered and outwitted, pretend you've got it wrong, I meant to say "Hello, you're a FAT MAN!!!". Then laugh at them and run away. I've tried this one several times, and sometimes I take along a little cassette recorder so that I and the rest of the Silly Billies can have a good chortle when we get back to the pad afterwards.
(quoted from Rick in the Young Ones book: Bachelor boys)
of course this might seem a bit mean, but I'm sure you could come up with a variation. all part of OM you see.
Be interested to hear what kinda things you chat about ZP. BM you sly devil you, carrying on with crazy shit in a disguise that people find acceptable for you to be crazy in...I like your style.

pentaphobe

Joined: Jul 30, 2004
Posts: 65
Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 11:56 pm
Post subject:

hey! sorry to jump back to the top post (after so much other interesting stuff has passed), but bogusmagus' post inspired me to add two pennies...

bogusmagus: you've hit on one of my favorite preaching topics, and an ongoing pseudo-philosophy thingy that I've had for years...

Though I've spent so long preaching it in popular terms that I fear I may not have much to add - so a few random points off the cuff (forgive redudancy, I'm quoting myself):
randomness is just a pattern you don't understand [yet] - or - randomness is the presence of more information than you can decode.

these two (obvious) statements were drawn about a decade ago when I was sitting, stoned, staring at a broken television - I was in the dog-ends of a long obsession with pi and cryptography and was looking for patterns everywhere (and mildly obsessed with the gnosis caused by "information overload"). ("white noise" is the most common example of a "random" signal - and when explaining white noise to the uninitiated, most people seem to turn to detuned television sets, or detuned radios for an example.) anyway - sitting there I came to the (again, obvious) conclusion that there wasn't a random thing to be seen on that screen - instead it was a combination of a few clipped channels, solar flares, nearby cars, radios, etc.. all bundled together in a fairly narrow representation (black and white dots) that rendered it very difficult to comprehend.

okay - to the point(s) (if any):

information theory also refers to randomness (noise) as a sum of large amounts of information [in a narrow band]. this was interesting in the sense that the popular opinion (or common meme) on noise was an absence of information rather than a surplus.

cryptographers are also quite wise to the whole "random" thing, and refer to most things as pseudorandom. (to the best of my knowledge, the only thing they consider "truly random", or at least "random enough" is the decay of radioactive materials.

as far as I know - the standard definition of a "good" [pseudo]random sequence is a flat distribution. to put it another way, a sequence is considered "strong" if each possible value occurs an equal number of times to all of the other possible values.

The issue here (just to overexplain) is touched on by bogusmagus in his reference to asymmetrical probabilities in dice rolls - over a short enough sample period, ANY sequence can seem random and amusingly enough, over a short enough period, ANY sequence can seem ordered.

ie. (bad example)if I were to write the sequence: 6,5,? then you'd "know" it wasn't random.
if I wrote: 6,5,8,4,? - then you might end up scratching your head.

but if I were to write: 0,7,2,6,4,5,6,4,8,3,10,2,? then (again) you'd start to get the picture.
(and if I expanded the bandwidth and wrote:
0___2___4___6___8___10 __7___6___5___4___3____2
then you'd probably either slap your forehead, or wonder why I'm flogging this horse, and what it ever did to me)

likewise - if I roll a die 10 times, I might be able to find a basic pattern (which will no doubt be disproved within the following rolls) if I roll a die 100 times and write down how many occurances there are of each face, the distribution will be pretty even, and I [probably] won't find a pattern that matches. (it seems random) but if I roll the die 1,000,000,000 times, I might start to see a lean towards lower numbers (numbers that are opposite a face with a high number)

as bogusmagus mentioned, a TRUE random sequence should also include sequences like "77777" or "123456". And the mathematicians say that a true random sequence is evenly distributed.....

problem is: if you take a sample of a TRUE random sequence, there is a likelihood that your sample will not be evenly distributed, implying that the sequence doesn't fit "randomness". but keep going (let's be scientists, kids!) - extend that sample to get a little more detail. at this point, the distribution may increase or decrease at any given point... hmmm ...but keep going....

ad infinitum.

basically - it's not so much that "randomness is impossible" - but rather that "randomness can never be proven, nor disproven." (scientists love to hate that, et Vicky Verka)

.... hmm.. I could launch into a whole lot more in connection with this - but instead I will allow myself the realisation that jamesons and attempting to communicate left-brain concepts is just not working for me right now

please disregard all non-sequiters

bogusmagus
Post subject: Random Jottings

That's the stuff, Pentaphobe. Brilliant, thank-you. That's the big puzzle to me. I collected definitions of random and pattern - chaos and complexity - probable and improbable - and brooded about open and closed systems for years.

If I could get it (anticipate random sequences) I could break the bank at the casino. If I could simulate randomness I could cheat at gambling and still get away with it (it's only the really improbable that is going to draw attention - all you need is a slight edge - it's all that the casinos and banks and insurance companies run on, after all, they don't have to cheat - although Las Vegas adding the double zero to French Roulette just seemed greedy to me).

Here are some of my 'random jottings' from back in the days when I was reading Prigogene - and before we had quite reached chaos and complexity theories, and fractals, and emergent order and all that...

Quote:
A sequence of events is said to be random if there is no way of predicting the next event of a given kind from the event or events that have preceded and if the system obeys the regularities of probability. Note that the events which we say are random are always members of some limited set. The fall of an honest coin is said to be random. At each throw the probability of the next fall being heads or tails remains unchanged. But the randomness is within the limited set. It is heads or tails; no alternatives are to be considered.

Quote:
Probability theory says nothing about individual events.

Quote:
Chance is essentially unpredictable because singular.

Quote:
We cannot act without being part of a distribution. Probability distributions do not affect individual events. Individual events establish the distribution. Individual chaos implies collective determinism.

Quote:
Random events are bound to even out in the end. If they don't, they aren't random.

Quote:
The most probable outcome is the most disordered (the outcome with the most ways of manifesting) - 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (tendency to entropy) leads to absolute disorder and ignorance.

most probable most stable least ordered

There is a range of disorder that not only allows, but actually encourages formation of local order. In complex, far from equilibrium states, improbable fluctuations occur.
I used to love this stuff when I was stoned...it's DNA's Improbability Drive...

Quote:
Thus, according to the theory of chance implied in the idea of dissipative structures, when fluctuations force an existing system into a far-from-equilibrium condition and threaten its structure, it approachs a critical moment or bifurcation point. At this point, according to the authors, it is inherently impossible to determine in advance the next state of the system. Chance nudges what remains of the system down a new path of development. and once the path is chosen (from among many) determinism takes over again until the next bifurcation point is reached. Here, in short, we see chance and necessity not as irreconcilable opposites, but each playing its role as a partner in destiny. If Prigogene and Stengers are right and chance plays its part at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over again until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don't they de-chance it?

PRIGOGINE: Yes. That would be true. But, of course, we can never determine when the next bifurcation will arise.

ZenPunkist

Post subject: Holey Ship (of state)!

That's some seriously mind-blowing stuff right there! You all are amazing!
Unity, Randomness, trickster, random acts of chaos . . . here it goes:
In one pocket, put a set of dice - in the other pocket, put a numbered list of conversation topics (you could maybe borrow from this forum). Roll the dice & pick a topic that matches the # you roll before approaching the unsuspecting.

Find a group of 3 people (my experiences find the best reception from groups of 3). Ask them if they're enjoying conversing privately as a group, or if they might welcome the intrusion of a stranger. If they blow you off, throw the dice at them & run (just kidding). I usually explain that I think that as technology advances, human beings interact less & less (except for the internet - but there people usually only talk with others who share their same interests - so small scope nonetheless) - thus become more dependent on the media to tell them what the people around them are like. The media is faulty and subjective, so we become more & more out of touch with our own species unless we interact as such.

That's my opener . . . it usually makes people less defensive & more responsive to me. It's amazing how hard it is to get people over the general sense that everyone who approaches them is trying to get something out of them. That must come from depending on the media to depict society as it is.

bogusmagus
Post subject: You're probably going to love this, then...

I heard that Brian Eno had a set of cards that he got made up to help him when he was creatively stuck (working on music with Bowie, like "Low" etc) - and they were called (as a set) Oblique Strategies.

I originally got a pseudo-random set (for free!) from the web,and kept them on my desk top.

Then I got a download of all the words, and made a paper set (to which I could add my own, of course).

Finally I treated myself to a beautiful pack of cards that I got from Rough Trade.

I can't recommend them highly enough, so I won't.

fuzzbuddy

Those cards sound interesting, I just looked at the website. Yesterday I kept noticing the number 8 in a lot of places. Not sure how I got tuned into 8-ness or even why, so I wouldn't say it's synchronicity, but I wouldn't necessarily think of it as random either. I know a guy who plays "psychic craps" at casinos. I've seen him with a few £grand in under an hour before and when he was helping me learn (I didn't really understand the rules fully, which i think wrecked my concentration a bit) I threw hard 6 and then he said can you do that again and so I did. He likes to finda table where time is acting "oddly" and if someone is having a long turn without realising that "he shouldn't be" according to negative thoughts etc. he helps the peolpe around him keep him in that zone..

pentaphobe
Post subject:
This just popped up "randomly" - says more in a sentence than all of my above waffling

Quote:
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

(no source)

RAW
Joined: Jul 24, 2004
Posts: 102
Location: Republic of California
Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2004 9:10 pm
Post subject:

I suspect that randomness exists only in the holistic system [observer/observed]
and not in the observed alone.

Like predictibility, or information/

Acrillic
Joined: Jul 23, 2004
Posts: 49
Location: on the road
Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 1:56 pm

I find Rupert Sheldrake's experiments and descriptions very helpful in getting a handle on the tricky concept's of predictability, randomness, precognition etc. Bogus and Pentaphobe, you have an amazing ability to translate into words the mind-bending concepts. Noyse thread.

Quote:Experiments on Telephone Telepathy by Rupert Sheldrake

INTRODUCTION

Many people have found that they think about someone they haven't thought of for a while, and then that person calls. Also, many people say that sometimes when the telephone starts ringing they sometimes know who is calling them, even when they had no reason to expect this person to call.

Skeptics usually dismiss these experiences by suggesting that they are a matter of chance coincidence, combined with selective memory: people only remember the times they were right and forget when they were wrong. But skeptics have no data to back up these suggestions. Surprisingly, there as been almost no research on this subject, so the question is entirely open. --

Bogus Magus:

Well, I can't speak for Pentaphobe but my own interest dates right back to childhood, when my hobby was conjuring. If you spend your childhood shuffling cards and trying to make them do improbable things then you need to know what appears improbable to people, and what could just be 'luck'.

Given that 'suckers' all play some kind of card game, most people think they know roughly how likely certain outcomes are. Gamblers are notoriously unreliable about odds - except for the sober professional gambler, who plays as shrewdly as 'the bank' or 'casino' or 'insurance company', all of whom make their profits on small but regular margins, which are predictable (unless someone cheats).

Sucker: Is this a game of chance?

W.C.Fields: Not the way I play it, no...

It seems weird that people could shuffle and deal a deck of cards and end up with a full suit each. The odds of that particular sequence resulting from a shuffle are represented by the number 52x51x50x49x48 etc. It's a huge impressive number. As it happens, of course, these are the same odds against ANY particular sequence of cards. Every time you shuffle cards you end up with one of these combinations. So wildly improbable is not impossible, in fact, one of these sequences is CERTAIN.

For me to think an event appeared weird the cards might have to be dealt out and not just distribute themselves to four individuals but arrive in sequence AH 2H 3H 4H 5H, etc. But that would still be superstitious behaviour on my part - that would still be one of the possible outcomes that happen every time you play.

Indeed I think the fascination of gambling for humans has always been to watch the random dance, the apparently regular as well as the seemingly unusual (freak) event. As all outcomes are equally likely the surprise can only come from sequences that look like patterns to us.

If I can reproduce one of those weirder outcomes it looks like 'magic', just because it is improbable (not impossible) - for the audience it is fun to 'be there' to witness such an unusual event.

When unusual patterns emerge from the random the casino will investigate the possibility of cheating, of course, or may wish to cheat themselves to stop randomness giving away all their money!

We are talking big numbers here:

Quote:
If you are dealt 13 cards, your chances of getting the following hands are:

13 spades (in any order): 1 in 635,013,559,600
13 cards in the same suit (in any order): 1 in 158,753,389,900
13 spades in the CORRECT order (i.e. Ace,2,3,....queen,king): 1 in 3,954,242,643,910,000,000,000
If you have four players receiving 13 cards each, these are the chances involved:

All four players getting one complete suit each: 1 in 2,235,197,406,900,000,000,000,000,000
All four players getting all 13 cards of their favourite suit in the correct order :
1 in 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Still nowhere near a Googol ( a 1 with 100 zeros after it).

And of course, none of this eliminates the possibility of the intervention of the gods, or the effect of seriously willing the cards to come out in your favour (although one assumes that opposing player's wishes might cancel each other out!) It is certainly an opportunity for fate to interfere in your life and change everything at the turn of a card.

Personally, I would recommend asking for a new deck, shuffling them, and getting someone else to cut, before playing for money.

Still, Hilda Golding says it happened to her and her friends

pentaphobe

I think Terry Pratchett put it well:

"But it's a million in one chance!"
"yes, but Million in one chances happen nine times out of ten."

(paraphrasing)

bogusmagus
Post subject: yup

He's so fecking succinct...
_________________
"Counterpoints of anthropologists in less specialized cultures include shamans, tricksters, clowns and kind-fools. These figures, like professional anthropologists, doubt the absoluteness of their own culture."

And some of these obsessions, and practice runs at explaining things, ended up in a piece I wrote for the Maybe Quarterly #5 - "I wouldn't Want To Play Cards With Him" and also possibly in these pieces (well, I called it an obsession!) Always Assuming Deception Detection The Mind Playing Tricks on Itself and probably quite a lot of my other stuff!

The Infallible System

2008-02-06T14:07:00.000Z

Derren Brown did a wonderful special this week – debunking belief systems again – this time, the belief in an unbeatable gambling system. He did start the show with a demonstration of long odds which seemed far more likely a magic trick, and then demonstrated the possibility of tossing a coin heads ten times in a row, but quickly moved on to showing a member of the public being given ‘infallible’ horse-racing tips, and (gaining in confidence) increasing their bet each time.

The System

Cutting to the chase, after about five bets, the single mum met with the ‘mysterious tipster’ only to find it was Derren! He talked her into gathering a lot more money for one final big bet. On the day he told her about the method he had employed (more on that in a moment) and that this time it was a real risk (!) When the horse he said he had put her money on lost, she panicked, but he told her to check the ticket he had got for her, and in fact he had put the money on the correct horse.

[SPOILER ALERT]

As Derren himself told the audience at home how he did it, this is not an expose, but you might just want to watch it first and figure it out later. I knew pretty early on what he was doing, but not the exact scale of it, but I have studied scams, cons, magic, probabilities, get-rich-quick schemes, etc so it seemed like familiar ground.

Essentially, he started out with 8000 people and divided them into groups (five groups for a five horse race, six groups for a six horse race, etc) and simply apologised to losers (the tv company offered to reimburse their small losses) and continued with winners, each time shrinking the group of people being filmed (all unaware of each other, and thinking they were the only participant).

These folks began to trust the ‘system’ and the tips, and raised their stakes. Improbable events really spooked them, however (when the woman’s horse was running third, and the front runner fell at the last jump and took out the second placed horse) for instance. How could he predict that!

What most amused me about his ‘dirty trick’ at the end (letting her think she had lost, now that she knew there was no ‘magic’ involved, only to reveal he was still right) was the thought that perhaps she wasn’t really the ‘last one standing’ but that he had reduced it to five before the revelation, and was still using the same principle to guarantee a cliff-hanger with a happy ending…

We may never know!

The Tipster Scam

This scheme of tipping was used in the past as a scam, and you simply asked for a share of any winnings from your subscribers. You would offer the range of tipped horses to your users, apologise to the losers (guaranteeing better luck next time) and taking a cut from the winners...some of whom (the 'winners') would be recommending your ‘system’ by word of mouth. It’s a perfect scam, as tipping can only appear an ‘art’ not a ‘science’. Does anyone check how accurately newspaper tipsters (who can’t use the risk-spreading scheme) actually predict results? Do they do any better that astrologers and mediums? Or does the usual self-fooling ‘remember the hits and forget the misses’ psychology work for them, too?

Oh, and tossing ten heads in a row, with no fake coin, and no camera tricks?

I think it took them about nine hours of filming until they witnessed that!

More magical references...

2007-11-02T19:37:00.000Z

I moved onto a second Brookmyre book, and it seemed to contain quite a lot of magical references again. Of course, magicians must prove quite a source for 'impossible murders or robberies' etc (think of UK tv's Jonathan Creek) - or maybe the research he did spread far enough to inspire another book, or maybe Brookmyre does amateur magic, like me.

Anyway, The Sacred Art of Stealing amused me. One of the things I like is that I can't quite put my finger on what kind of book it is. Check out the mixed reviews on his website, here.

Indeed, you can see a link to the Rubber Ducks book, too.

I still hope to get to the Day of Magic in Cardiff, just to see who does this stuff around here. I already know a couple of members, vaguely.

Some of my Own Writing

2007-10-22T13:34:00.001+01:00

The Rubber Ducks book proved excellent! Very funny, and although it leaned towards the sceptical position with regards to psi-research, it also made it hard to judge whether the author 'believed' or not, as the story got told by a 'dead' sceptical narrator. Any more would prove a Spoiler - but I recommend it. The library shelved it under Crime and Thrillers, but it seemed a bit more than that, including a fair bit of satirical humour - I'll definitely try some more offerings from Christopher Brookmyre.

I have worked on the cross-over between 'performance' magic and ritual magick, and the connections to deception and belief systems in general, with some contributions to the Maybe Logic gang:

Magical Means: A Meeting of Mind
(8000 words of mine, pix by the fantastic Bobby from Madison Underground Press) - an imaginary encounter between Houdini and Crowley.
See other stuff of Bobby's here, then hire him to do some graphic work for you...why not?

* I Wouldn't Want to Play Cards with Him*
A piece about randomness and possibility, odds, cards, games and cheating.

*Indian Rope Trick*
Review of an analysis of this urban mythical trick, and how it arose.

*Always Assuming*
Short piece about con men, and manipulation of other people’s realities.

*Deception Detection*
Moving on from Always Assuming to the cross-over between magic, intelligence operations, confidence tricks, etc. This got expanded into:
* The Mind Playing Tricks On Itself*
Bart Whaley, Orson Welles, and Deception Detection

**Bearded magicians***Eugene Burger on why boys get into magi… maybe...

Atrocious and Absurd

2007-10-13T16:14:00.000+01:00

My apologies to anyone who does pop in here. It still remains rather shapeless, staggering between performance magic, scepticism about 'magick' and the supernatural, atheism, etc.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

I have just borrowed from the library - Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - which the author says comes from James Randi's description of people who persist in believing in something ludicrous, however much evidence confronts them...

As you can see in a piece he wrote for The Guardian called

Dangerous Nonsense
Faith is not a form of mental fortitude, but an absurdity - which can give rise to atrocity

Really sorry I missed this event!

2007-08-23T11:31:00.000+01:00

One of the guys at MLA (thanks, Badger!) sent me a link to a wonderful sounding conference in the USA, where the link between Magic and Consciousness research got explored.

The Magic of Consciousness Symposium
@
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness

Look at this line-up!

Teller, of Penn & Teller, will discuss the mechanisms of:
“Disguising one action as another”
Such as the difference between motion and action (“Action is motion with a purpose”)

Apollo Robbins, Professional Thief and Pickpocket, who successfully pickpocketed the presidential secret service guarding Jimmy Carter, will discuss:
“Misdirection is the story that you make them remember”
Or how the audience believes what they are tricked into believing, despite evidence to the contrary

Mac King, headliner at Harrah's on The Strip, will speak about why:
“It’s a bad idea to do the same trick twice”
And why magicians never announce their tricks in advance

James Randi, aka The Amaz!ng Randi, and Founder of the James Randi Foundation will present:
“Implying data that isn’t there”
Or how an audience can be lulled into eagerly accepting suggestions and unspoken information

Johnny Thompson, from The Great Tomsoni and Co. will talk about:
“Closing all the doors”
Or the importance of reducing all potential explanations to nothing but magic

And here's an article about attending it, from the NY Times.

Slowly getting there

2007-07-28T12:19:00.000+01:00

Well, this blog can't entertain other people very much, but then again it's only a notepad for me, and if you want to browse the links I have accumulated down the right hand side it should keep you busy.

Hi Minnar - Derren Brown link (what's the US show called?) and also the one to Martin Taylor (who practices the style of hypnosis Derren felt inspired by - i.e. the one that doesn't think you can find a special state called 'hypnotised', just a combination of social compliance, respect for authority, etc). Heated debate continues (what about painless surgery under hypnosis?) but certainly the performing side of it seems adequately explained (to me) by:

• Suggestion: when we are told to feel something, there is a strong subconscious force which makes us really feel it.
• Social pressure: people want to behave the way their friends are behaving; if their friends appear to be under a hypnotist’s power, they will want to act the same way.
• Simple obedience: people will generally do as they are told, especially by someone in authority.

And, of course, when you pull a member of the audience into a show they get particularly co-operative (because of the stage fright!)

Ahem. I haven't started doing tricks for people again, but have determined to set aside at least a little time in the coming months. I don't socialize about this. Perhaps a magic club helps with card tricks, etc, but the 'mentalist' model seems more suited to a lone wolf (although we all need someone to practice on!) I can't even quite tell why I think this particular area of magic might suit me (not just because it is in fashion), but I have always just followed my nose. This study time may eventually lead to something else entirely.

I have some idea of the range of material I want to work through, and the style. I have ploughed through thousands of tricks to find the half dozen I want to work on and use. Still - I have no idea whether I will ever actually get to use it all...

I saw The Illusionist last night (at last) and enjoyed it. An amiable ambiguity about whether Edward Norton's character has magic powers, but they came down on the side of logical explanation (which I prefer). If I had to watch on again, however, I suspect I would have more fun with the hidden references in that other movie, oh what's its name? Aha! The Prestige. I can never remember the title first time because the magic jargon is entirely made up...When I read about magic I get Effect:Presentation:Method as a delivery system. And 'show-biz' already has lots of terms for the end point or surprise or twist - the punch-line, the pay-off, the climax, the money shot, etc!

Magic Books

2007-04-20T11:30:00.000+01:00

No I don't mean Happy Potter and all that stuff.

When you enjoy conjuring you have to fend off fantasists on the left, and occultists on the right (although you can filch plot-lines and cover stories from both!)

Although conjuring has a very naff (nerd) image, it goes through phases of seeming fashionable. Penn and Teller almost made it cool for a while. The DBs (David Blaine and Derren Brown) in their own very different ways found methods for getting it on television. As well as films, you can find it employed for fiction, and recently I have come across these:

Fifty-two Ways to Magic America by James Flint (Author)

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh

I don't want to stop and review them right now (haven't finished the Bullet Trick just yet) but they amused me enough.

I still prefer reading about real magicians and their stories... Jim Steinmeyer's books (as I mentioned before), Peter Lamont's stuff, etc. The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist by Karl Johnson, or Phantoms of the Card Table: Confessions of a Card Sharp by David Britland and Gazzo.

Funnily enough exposes like Lamont's deconstruction of 'the Indian Rope Trick as an urban myth' do not appear to sell that well. Just as you can see endless glossy coffee table books on crop circles, but can probably buy a remaindered copy of Round In Circles (a fairly affectionate debunking book).

Wiki has some fun stuff about the Indian Rope Trick.

I haven't compiled my favourite lists, but you'll find some at Amazon, like Diamond Jim Tyler's set. Nakul Shenoy has an interesting group (and yes, Henry Hay's book still excels, so sad about the title...) If card tricks interest you this list should keep you busy forever...

And Derren has returned to British television, even more demonic than before. Trick or Treat started with him entrancing a guy (having woken him in the middle of the night to sign a contract saying "we can do with you what we like!") in a photobooth, and then flying him to Morocco (in trance) only to wake up in the same photo booth! After 13 hours he must have been bursting for a piss...but they don't go into all that, or the ethics, or anything. AS they seem to have no morals I guess I don't feel bad in pointing out the ambigrams used to prevent the guy getting the 'Treat' and not the 'Trick'. I hardly feel bad about it. Anyone who read Angels and Demons (and not just the fashionable Da Vinci Code) knows that John Langdon's ambigrams may either say the same thing when turned upside down, or something different. Two five letter words beginning with T seem perfect for such a thing.

However, when something apppears this obvious in a Derrren show, you tend to look for the double bluff! Just google "trick or treat ambigrams" to see how much air time (and discussion on magic forums) he gets out of the link with Dan Brown (a third DB, of course, but just a coincidence!) heh heh

Ho Hum Hokum

2007-04-01T18:58:00.000+01:00

I went over to my online hangout, the Maybe Logic Academy - just to let them know (people login from all over the planet, but mostly America) that Derren Brown would appear on the televisions in the summer, and to recommend the show - because the Academy focuses on belief systems as a core subject, and I consider Derren one of the best testers of your belief/disbelief.

He always admits/confesses/brags that his show uses trickery, and yet many people still attribute great powers to him. But then again, some people think David Blaine can levitate, and others think some sort of God invented the universe and can so do miracles if He wants to...(sigh)

Anyway. Several times in the past I have mentioned this hobby of mine, knowing full well how out of fashion and nerd/geeky it appears to most people - and tried to show how it draws on a wide range of skills and techniques, from many other realms of study. I think of magical inventors as early-uptakers.

Someone invents electro-magnets, and Robert-Houdin goes out and impresses the natives with a box their strongest man can't pick up, while he (after waving his wand, and secretly turning off the power!) can lift it with one hand.

Someone invents film, and magicians see the possibilities and incorporate it into their shows, devise most of the special effects we still use to this day, etc.

The first hand calculator appeared during my school days, and immediately magicians invented tricks with real ones (mostly mathematical ones) , and also invented 'gimmicked' ones...that might always give the same result after people entered random numbers, say.

The mobile phone appears, and magicians immediately apply their lateral thinking to the possibilities.

And so on.

So I always assume people into Neuro-Linguistic Programming might find it interesting that magicians have used verbal patterns for centuries, to manipulate people's perceptions. They did that even before Mesmer and hypnosis became formalised. But then again, so did politicians!

But anyway. I remain a geek. I try to draw parallels with (say) magick, because I see a cross-over, but people rarely like to see their own realm compared and contrasted, so I get into fairly heated debate/discussion. You can see the thread, which wandered off into discussion The Prestige - which several people really liked. I sat down to enjoy it, and dozed off (SHOCK!)

Next thing I know, I have got into quibbling about the fact that no 'real' conjuror uses that jargon of "three stages to a magic trick" that the author just invented. I would have far preferred it if he had done some research, and used real jargon...

Anyway - I won't write it all again. Visit the MLA and watch me fail to convince anyone!

Magic for television, and by book

2007-03-02T15:15:00.000Z

Doh, I managed to miss the first cycle of the tv programme, but noticed they came around a couple more times on the schedules, to give me another chance to record them.

For the last few nights I tuned in mid-evening, and thought they had changed the programme at the last minute, before it dawned on me that they transmitted it at 9 a.m. ! Curses!

So if I want to record it now I will have to catch the 2 a.m. (yawn) transmissions in mid-March.

-0-

I have really enjoyed all of Jim Steinmeyer's books:- Hiding the Elephant, Art and Artifice, the one on Chung Ling Soo - The Glorious Deception, and currently his book on Alan Wakeling's magic.

Writes well, doesn't give a lot away, but also doesn't get all prissy about 'secrets'. He gives you enough to feed your imagination, and to understand the kind of problems magical designers and performers faced, but will not spoil your enjoyment of the next show you see - if anything, you may enjoy the artistry even more, when you have some idea of the amount of sweat and effort that goes on backstage.

Real Magic - I mean - the real stuff

2007-02-07T02:13:00.000Z

UK TV Documentary have a series on the history of performance magic which far outstrips such shows as The Masked Magician Reveals, and all that nonsense. Yeah, that show revealed old tricks you might find in the books in your library, etc - but this series of six shows doesn't really reveal much (though it makes hints) but it includes interviews with the top guys - Jim Steinmeyer and other illusion designers, Jeff McBride and other top-class modern performers, and Peter Lamont and other serious historians of magic (and advisors like the exotic, eccentric Ali Bongo!)

Highly recommended!

Mind Magic 26th Feb 21.00-22.00
Levitation 27th Feb 21.00-22.00
Close-Up Magic tomorrow - Thur 8th - 1am- 2am - also - 28th Feb 21.00-22.00
Disappearances Fri 9th - 1am- 2am - also - 1st Mar 21.00-22.00
Dangerous Magic Sat 10th - 12 - 1am - also - 2nd Mar 21.00-22.00
Violent Magic Sat 10th - 1am 2am - also - 3 Mar 21.00-22.00

And if you miss those - one last chance at the whole series from the 14-19 Mar at 2 a.m.

If I can get the damned new machine working I will certainly try to record them for future reference. Excellent stuff, with rare footage, reconstructions, etc.

They have a season going on, so you will find other stuff of interest during this month. Go to their site and Search for 'magic'...as they say...

What do Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Orson Welles, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Muhammad Ali have in common?

If you like 'Breaking The Magician's Code, you'll find one on ITV4 on the 14th...21.00-22.00

As ever, for magic related television in the UK, check out Magic Week. (permanent link on the right...)

The Coming Year

2007-01-19T16:48:00.000Z

It appears that I may find more time to focus on magic, as the online studying I have spent my time on for the last couple of years may come to an end.

I have put this page together to collect my own favourite links together, to have a place to point to when discussing magic with folks online, to contribute to intelligent thinking about so-called 'psychic' events and phenomena, etc.

NB: I have as much interest as the next person in human creativity, imagination, intuition, myth-making, psychology, anthropology, etc - so please don't dismiss me as some mere hardline-materialist-sceptic with a closed mind. Having said that, I consider it essential that you have at least some grounding in the possibilities of trickery and devious thinking if you intend to investigate (or invest in) 'real psychics'.

I have started carrying a pack of cards around again (as I did as a kid!) for playing with in idle moments...and want to spend a bit of time working through some of the material I collected in the last year or two online (rather different from the days of hanging around in Davenports). I particularly enjoy not having to wait for material by downloading clean, modern ebooks from places like Trickshop, or slightly harder-to-find material from Chris Wasshuber's Lybrary.

As I have re-established my circus connections, I may look at some of the bigger style effects, too (they might like an illusion for the new show), but generally I prefer close-up with (apparently) ordinary objects.

In case I sound too sceptical for my own good...

2007-01-02T15:26:00.001Z

I don't intend to expose tricks here, so some of the more 'secret' magic shops have not got listed in the Links Column. I don't intend to act in an arch and knowing manner, just respect a few discrete mailing lists I have joined. As I don't perform magic right this moment I don't feel part of an 'in-crowd' and came to all those professional links by surfing, so no big secrets, but just a little respect. At the same time, if I tip a few methods, or places to look at least, it arises from the fact that I mostly belong in the sceptical camp when it comes to 'psychic phenomena'. I don't deny the possibility, I don't claim to understand all the mysterious goings-on, I simply don't choose to jump to explaining one unknown with another.

Using Occam's Razor I want all possibility of conscious or unconscious 'cheating' (experimenter bias!) eliminated before I can even consider such things. I appreciate that Martin Gardner can get too zealous on the side of the sceptical, just as James Randi can lose his sense of humour at times - so can Richard Dawkins or Jonathan Miller when confronted by True Believers - and in the Maybe Logic Academy forum I have received material to follow up, from people who dislike me prematurely slamming a door on any possiblities (fair enough - but for every careful debunking book you can find 20 best-sellers of glib nonsense).

I have no faith in 'God' as an explanation of anything, I dislike New Age people co-opting half-digested Quantum Mechanics to explain stuff, and even trying to sound streetwise ("What The *#!*# Do They Know?"). I find crop circles hilarious and rather impressive, but don't really think they indicate messages from aliens, and I have a similar position on UFOs and abductions.

I have little problem with mental phenomena (we understand consciousness so little) so lucid dreaming, out-of-the-body travelling, various trance phenomena don't challenge me much. When these become 'remote viewing' or 'communication with the dead' I get a bit more sceptical - but remain curious and interested - after all, I don't challenge Buddhists about reincarnation, I just wonder if I properly understand what they might mean by that.

As I said, I don't deny the (small and remote) possibility that the common explanations of 'mysterious events' have an element of truth, but I certainly lean towards the idea that they all arise from the wonderful nature of human creativity - and the anthropological difficulties of imagining people more devious, imaginative or misguided than oneself! heh.

I prefer Charles Fort making up even more improbable explanations than these rather timid ones of 'energy' and 'powers' and 'spirits', when he found himself confronted with events he found hard to explain.
I find Banachek (a professional mentalist now, but originally one of the two boys who conspired with Randi, in Project Alpha, to demonstrate how easily 'scientists' could get fooled) more interesting than (say) Christian faith healers (even if placebo effects and other such may explain some of their results - rather than pure cons).

"My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike to ever mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way". Charles Fort

Secret Messages

2007-01-02T12:11:00.000Z

Amusingly enough, this morning I received a book on codes and secret signals which I ordered weeks ago. Apart from my general fascination with communication, it covers some things like magical codes (pseudo-telepathy, etc). Knowledge of such things does make one wary of claims that such hidden human skills exist and that people have ‘proven’ they exist in laboratories. Sadly, if you want to believe, of course, then the fact that people can cheat does not convince you that your particular hero does cheat. In fact, you can counter-claim that the presence of a sceptic prevents such things occurring! This delightful notion may have some basis in truth, but it does mean that I may never witness them. Nowadays it gets labelled experimenter-effect or some such (just as God has turned into Intelligent Design).

I won’t go there, for now. My interest started because of my focus on magic as a child, which drew me into many fascinating human skills, and the devious use of intelligence.

I’d like to expand on this a little. Overt and Covert communication can both contain secrets. If I wear a mask the witness knows they can’t see my face, but know I have hidden something. Likewise, if I can overhear a code that appears like gibberish to me it may become a challenge to crack it (it contains some secret). Rather more subtly, (as if I wore a prosthetic mask, or even the makeup that women seem convinced remains ‘invisible’) then no clue exists that anything hidden lies beneath. Similarly, a code ‘hidden in plain sight’ seems innocent, and appears not to need investigation.

Of course, conspiracy theorists (and I don’t use that as a term of abuse, rather one of zeal) take the innocent surface as a challenge. This seems very conscientious, but it can also lead to problems as humans have a fatal fascination for finding patterns and can find them in random material so the signal/noise problem arises.

To not find any secret message or content can just make such people renew their efforts, rather than accept that either nothing hidden exists, or that (even if it exists)it can never get proved. To revert to the ‘true believer’ problem - I like to use the example of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a convinced Spiritualist, and got very annoyed with his friend Houdini for continually exposing the tricks of the trade, and accusing mediums of fraud. Actually, it appears Houdini never closed his mind to the possibility of communication with the dead, but got depressed, exasperated and angry at the cheap tricks getting used on vulnerable people, and so campaigned vigorously to expose the tricks of 'fake mediums'. In retaliation, Doyle claimed that Houdini did his own tricks by psychic means, but unconsciously!

He said he felt disappointed that Houdini (a natural medium) should spend his life in denial!

Such Freudian double-think seemed pretty fresh and clever in the 1920s, no doubt. If he had kept it to mental phenomena he might just have convinced some people, perhaps even Houdini, but Doyle even tried to explain physical matters that he didn't understand, like how Houdini escaped from boxes, handcuffs and suchlike – leaving them locked! Or how he walked through a wall freshly built on stage. To tell Houdini that 'actually' he dematerialised and re-materialised elsewhere when Harry knew exactly how he did it must have really annoyed Houdini, but although he claimed ‘natural means’ for everything he did in his shows, he could not prove that without giving away his own secrets. More on Houdini and Doyle. One does have to bear in mind that Doyle did not display the wonderful scepticism and ingenuity and insight of Sherlock Holmes, his most famous creation! For a good laugh, check out his belief in the photos of fairies, for instance...On a more sinister note, the latest biography of Houdini not only implies that he did a bit of unoffical spying during his travels (and a magician's tools and skills match those of a spy quite closely), but that angry spiritualists might have helped cause his death (they certainly sent him death threats).

That whole ‘Unconscious’ thing still bugs me slightly, even though it has useful applications. I think we need some systems language to describe the situation better. Talk of ‘the Unconscious’ implies a thing, a place, etc. If we talk of ‘out-of-awareness events’ then perhaps it becomes clearer that consciousness can focus in different places, and that ‘everything else’ lies in the ‘peripheral vision’ of our minds, not currently in focus, but certainly available to us. All the current interest in body language, for instance, shifts the focus from ‘unconscious signals’ or ‘tells’ to attempts to consciously read or control them (not a new process to the acting profession, for instance, or spies, smugglers, politicians, etc).

Magicians' skills have helped in wartime, from the use of camouflage (Maskelyne the War Magician) to the ingenuity of the Twenty Committee (XX or double-cross) and even sleight-of-hand for poisoning the opposition (many magicians still feel rather upset with John Mulholland for such unethical use of their skills). Information, misinformation and disinformation have a long history in wartime, and in population management by priests, kings and politicians - and remains fascinating to me, to this day.

All this, from a new book in the post!

Ideas Galore

2006-12-31T20:42:00.000Z

As ever, most of this work aims at giving me quicker access to resources, if you wanna share 'em go ahead, but the intent remains making my own life easier!

I have all sorts of stuff to compile, and collate, etc, but with the Gregorian New Year getting everyone eager to celebrate a new number (007!) I thought I'd throw in this 'smal world' map of Bucky's view of the world (he reckons we already have enough, if we only distributed it better, and he remained optimistic that we could work our way out of apparent crisis...although we do have to wake up, of course.

I don't know why Christian governments can show such glee at killing someone (I felt pleased to hear two Christian peace envoys - who got kidnapped in Iraq - saying they did not want to witness against their captors if that meant they would get executed, and that they would have retrained Saddam Hussein as a bricklayer, so he could help rebuild Iraq!) Too late for compassion (even for 'evil' people) so I leave you with an image that says it all, to me, about stupidity or the banality of evil, and how it mostly seems related to ignorance.

Some kind of reason for changing...

2006-12-31T19:59:00.000Z

I wanted this blog to give me the excuse to update my information and resources, and perhaps make them more attractive.
My ramshackle website grew and grew as I learned new things, and it became my sandpit for messing about and trying things. I never really thought of it as a publication. However, as in design terms it never graduated beyond the use of a Front Page Template (I found 'content' more interesting) it now looks very old-fashioned, but it would represent an immense amount of work to rebuild it, so I figured I might tease it apart slowly.
For instance - I used one page as a place to dump interesting links, but I never made it look very interesting! I called it a Things to Do on a Wet Afternoon kind of a page.
I have reconnected with my scattered family again, so I feel quite pleased that I have tried to put at least a little detail of the family online, although I know I have left lots out. And I recently did a family tree (which you can see in the old blog) which could get added in there.
I keep intending to compile a book/autobiography, etc - but I suspect the website stole quite a lot of the energy intended for that - and maybe made a hard copy book quite redundant. I still like books however (to read in the bath) and maybe others do, too. Although, having said that, Miles Hochstein seems to think I have made a good start on an audio-visual presentation of a life... If you go to his site you can read other people's lives, and see his own good example of how to go about it...

What a hectic few years

2006-12-31T19:18:00.000Z

I have really enjoyed all my 'real life' friends over many years now, but rather than become boring once I stopped travelling I got into the Web, and have now many friends I haven't met in 'real time' or 'real life' or whatever. As well as keeping my brain stimulated with research, with new viewpoints, and a lot of other wordy stuff, I have also spent a lot of time in picture research, to try to prevent dry posts from becoming unreadable. I realise that some copyright issues arise with such reckless collaging of other people's work, but I can't see any change happening any time soon, apart from finding other ways to reward popular artists...

My computer seems filled with strange, evocative and eclectic images...

Ever-increasing intelligence (perhaps our only hope)

2006-12-31T19:13:00.000Z

SMI²LE

Increasing Intelligence