Wow, that last illusion is awesome!

I remember a VHS tape my father owned, made by Penn & Teller to allow you to perform magic tricks with your friends. It was made way back in the early 90's and when they were doing things on Showtime, I believe. It required you to do the same thing you've just mentioned to successfully pull off the trick.

Anyway, as I just mentioned, the tricks on that VHS tape were done the same as what you described. You "must" take the word of whomever you're listening to as "the truth". Because if they do lie, about certain elements, a trick can be performed by them and you may never be able to figure out how the trick is done. Unless you realize that someone you off-handedly let tell you a "fact" and you automatically allowed this "fact" to be the truth without any scrutiny, is finally re-looked at to see if it's validity still holds up.

Penn & Teller have you perform this same "trick" or psychological manipulation in their VHS tape magic trick to use on others and as you mentioned we are assuming that Penn & Teller are indeed on the up & up when another person on their show performs a magic trick... If they lie to us, as you mentioned, a trick can automatically be accomplished since we've given Penn & Teller a "free pass" to tell us whatever they want.

As you mentioned Penn & Teller do in fact use this methodology to perform some of their tricks and as I mentioned they even sold "magic tricks" that used this very same idea to create a magic trick or an illusion. So I wouldn't put it past them that they may indeed use this same thing on their own TV show...

We just have to hope they won't.

Well then we're back to the original discussion - if you think that every behavior on the wrong side of the law is 'bad' and every behavior on the right side of the law is 'good,' then you have an astounding amount of faith in the quality of the laws. I'm arrogant (and I'm legally trained) so I believe that I have an obligation to break certain laws, and an obligation to not exercise certain rights that I technically have, because I'd just make society worse.

I don't believe that these kinds of audits, or the open carry demonstrations, are good ways to reduce police abuse. Quite the opposite - by 2013 almost half the states had stop and identify statutes, and people like this, who are intentionally pretending to be threats in order to provoke poor reactions, are pushing the remaining states to adopt similar restrictions on citizen freedom. This makes society more fearful, not freer.

(I don't know why he's on the watch list. They might think he's a Sovereign Citizen, another group of hero assholes, who happen to be classified as a domestic terror group (of heroes). I doubt he is, but I have no illusions about the effectiveness of the watch lists)

I was providing a more "technology tailored" way to fool us and how it might create a great magic trick. I also love magic tricks that make use of self-created "magical" devices (his vest counts towards what I'm talking about).

As I mentioned there are probably quite a few ways to do this trick and I wholeheartedly agree with you that the most likely way the majority of this was done was via misdirection and cues. As it is true with almost everything, the simplest answer usually is the truth.

I however, became interested with he kept moving his hands (and the "cards") to the same spots or moving them, repeating, the same movement over and over again right before the "change" or flip occurred (with other things as well like the smoke--and yes, I know it was more than likely misdirection--but, sometimes smoke is just smoke ).

That is what made me think of a scanner (mostly because I'm a computer/engineering/physics hippie and I have seen scanners that can be made to look exactly like that mat; but I also have learned a bit of magic, with that instead of becoming an amateur magician I instead learned about magic and it's history instead). But, like you said and I also said above in my comment, this all can/could be done through many various schemes. Using differing ways of that same scheme/idea, the same mechanics and/or devices, with sleight of hand and a lot of misdirection (very well done too, simply because there was so very much of it needed--which Penn & Teller commended him on in their own way).

His jacket for example is obviously HIS engineered creation. It has a lot of hidden and secret functionality; in fact it may have been the underlying foundation that allowed the whole trick to work so well (you never know just what exactly is the magician's biggest helper in many tricks). That is what I love, personally, about magic is the engineering and love--the workmanship--that can go into it. Every great magician definitely has that engineering facet to their personality; they all know how to create a device that gives them just what they need. I've seen so many magical devices and how they were used and how they're made as well and I must say, it is a terribly interesting thing to learn about and see done. Sometimes you have devices made just to perform one extremely small function, just to add that little bit of "panache" to a trick...

Every magician--good and average--however do have or need one thing in common no matter what, and this refers to what you talk about (and this magician may be leagues ahead of others, making all tricks completed in that same manner seem simple and mundane compared to what he can accomplish with the exact same, extremely fundamental, aspect to magic; pulling off tricks that almost all magicians would believe to be impossible using such a standard fare of abilities and methods): agility and sleight of hand. With this comes the uses for that "god-like" speed and manipulation. Use that with engineered tools (not necessarily what I mentioned--the scanner, printer, and ink method--but, things easier to craft and more likely to be used like his vest) and it can suddenly make any of the simplest tasks (or even tricks that other magicians perform) we do everyday, extraordinary if not miraculous.

I thought I'd add my idea, because I like to figure these tricks out as well; as I'm sure many of you are as well.

Overall, if I was Penn and Teller, I'd be most impressed with his ability to keep his showmanship intact while obviously needing great concentration on the trick at the same time--not to mention he keeps showing superb sleight of hand the whole time.

So many magicians are just amazing to watch. The tools they create (which can be so complicated that you'd never believe that someone would create such a thing or something fairly complicated to complete one very easy task) sometimes never let their presence be known--if done right. But in other cases you know there is "something" helping the magician, but you can't begin to imagine what exactly he has created or what exactly it is accomplishing for him.

I do wish they'd give us a general idea how these tricks are performed, without destroying the "magic" involved. Just tell us general things, like "misdirection and a magical device", etc... They don't need to explain it into it's minutiae.

I'll always love magic and the amazing use of the mind and the body to create illusions grand and small (or "magic" that just tests the limits OF the mind or the body; feats, as it were).

When the body and mind work together in perfect unison to create such wonderful uses of sleight of hand, feats, and "magical" devices...these are the type of people that will continue--hopefully for as long as humans exist--to create magic as real as it can get. Waking up the child inside us all!

/length

Your video, Why Your Decisions Are Meaningless And Choice Is An Illusion, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The more I see of it, the less hopeful I am. I still think it's going to be pretty cool, but it's seeming a little too grindy and a little too procedurally generated to the point of being superficial. Hopefully that's just because it's unfinished or they're holding things back.

What I liked about Freelancer, for instance, was that every NPC ship you came across had an identity and was apparently doing something the player might do. You could hail them and they'd say they're hauling some commodity from wherever to wherever or whatever, and if you followed them, that's exactly what they'd be doing. It anchored them to the universe and made it seem purposeful and alive. The ship encounters we've seen in this so far seem more like randomly spawned set dressing. The actual distinction between the two is purely illusion, but that illusion is important.

A computer big enough to accurately calculate the position and properties of every "particle" (and ever decreasing subdivisions of energy and matter) would need to be the size of the universe in the first place. We can't even simulate enough particles in an n-body simulation to match the number of stars in a galaxy, let alone individual molecules, or shall we go further and say atoms, or further and say protons, neutrons and electrons? And that's for ONE galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the OBSERVABLE universe... using only ONE force - gravity!

The guy has a great point about the Big Bang - a billion billion galaxies worth of matter and energy created in a split second from nothing? Doesn't sound like like the conservation of energy that is so fundamental to physics, right? But that's no reason to throw out hundreds of years of evidence and research which has proven conservation of energy to be true since then. The big bang makes the most sense given what we see today... if you want to propose a better theory, it has to make more sense than the Big Bang theory. Saying that the big bang doesn't make sense is not an appropriate starting point for a new theory, and doesn't lead to "so therefore we're in a simulation."

And it's not good enough to appeal to simplicity like @robdot is doing - basically saying that everything we see could very easily be an illusion for our benefit. That's an argument for God, in my opinion... just like how religious fanatics say "it was God's will for this to happen" we'd instead say "well, that's what the simulation wanted to show us" and call it a day. Furthermore if the manifestations of physical laws out there in the universe are illusions, they are at least consistent illusions that we can calculate and predict. And in that case, what is the difference to our lives whether we call it "reality" or "simulation" or "computer"? It it still what we always knew it was. If something created our universe and allowed it to run like a simulation, it is almost certainly intangible to us and for all intents and purposes meaningless too, because we can't touch, feel, see or understand it on any level.

This is one of the topics i asked of my favourite professor - how can we trust what we see if it could be faked, and what exists beyond our universe? His answer was, if i have to doubt what i see, i might as well not do anything at all, and if you want an answer to the second question talk to a philosopher. This is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. The scientific method doesn't care what you call the place you live in nor "who" we think "created" it. You can't hope to understand anything if you don't base it on the evidence you have. You certainly can't form a theory on the basis that all evidence is untrustworthy.

*ban

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=985bw09PR3s


*related=

http://videosift.com/video/NOW-IS-51-NOWIS-Optical-Illusions

http://videosift.com/video/BIGBANG-NOW-IS-BIG-BANG-NOWIS-electro

@947bis - that nearly brought a tear to my eye and explains EXACTLY why i was disappointed with Fallout 3. Or better to say, disappointed that it was given the label of Fallout instead of something like "Post Apocalyptic RPG".

FO3 had no subtlety. Sometimes you'd make decisions in Fallout 1&2 that you'd not even realised you'd made. Or chosen a dialogue option that you had no idea would affect how the game played out. There were multiple options to solve "quests" (there was no formal quest log) that would significantly alter the state of the rest of the game - what bases and equipment you had access to, and how you could ultimately finish the game. You could sneak into places, or disguise yourself and walk in, lie your way past NPCs, demolish your way in, then ultimately sabotage their base or fix it for them, ruin a gang's drug and slave trade, have sex with a crime boss's wife (or daughter if you preferred) and rob their safe before sneaking or shooting your way back out - and then the rival family would love you! It's as though the money they saved on not having voice actors for *every* NPC or graphical wizardry was spent on designing interesting, intertwined and thoughtful characters and situations, which were more fulfilling despite being a text only deal.

Fallout had so much character and charm and personality... It was genuinely funny and involved - in every area there would be many storylines that could affect each other directly and change the story, or change your reputation in the wasteland and affect your options elsewhere. FO3 feels cold and dead by comparison. In FO3, the decisions you make give the illusion of depth, when in actual fact only a small number of "decisions" affected the game at all, and even then, the consequences were not surprising or not impactful to the same degree.

God, i wish i could bottle the feeling of playing Fallout 1&2 back in the day.. i wish i could explain it to you young whippersnappers!

To be fair, he is portraying himself as an old guy. Everyone else is over 60 and he's wearing prosthetics and other crap to give the illusion of age.

Go Dancing Grannies

Opt-in would be an improvement in many cases, but I've changed my mind on it over the years and no longer see it as a working concept.

Let's put aside all the issues on the corporate end of things: even on the consumer end, it only ever works with competent consumers. Choice becomes a farce if you don't understand the different options, especially if any detrimental effects are indirect in nature, as is the case with the vast majority of information-related issues. The tiniest incentive is enough to sway folks towards pressing the fucking "Accept" button, so to speak.

In the same manner, transparency is all fine and dandy, but nobody's going to read anything longer than a single paragraph, everybody wants the paperwork out of the way so they can get the cookie.

Most folks don't have the time or the motivation to go into the nitty-gritty of personal data sovereignty. Put it up against convenience, and people don't give two shits about their data.

So there it is, the concept of a sovereign consumer is an illusion. The question is: do you take the decision away from the consumer for his/her own sake? Do you manipulate the decision making process by making it massively more inconvenient to give away your data?

Bad options all around...

It's the Illusive Man.

Besides, they could have just played this: https://youtu.be/mvypGrIG4B4

After years of watching hundreds of optical illusions, magic tricks etc , I really thought I was immune to the best possible versions of this kind of stuff, but this one caught me out completely. Absolutely brilliantly done.

I didn't catch it until she lifted her legs. And even worse, its SO obvious once you see it. makes the trick better IMO

I only made it to the :29 mark before I noticed some side boob. Then the whole illusion was ruined...and I continued to watch every second of it.

I like how he points out that the color "illusions" are not actually a brain failure, but an amazing visual processing feature honed by evolution. If the rubix cube were a real object photographed in yellow light and then in blue light, those tiles would have to be yellow and blue (not grey). It's like our brains calculate the true color under white light, and that's what we see.

Just think about how useful that is, without that feature we could never build up knowledge about what color different plants and animals are, because their color would seem to change drastically with the lighting conditions.