Derren Brown is *quality

I suspect Derren Brown was involved

Is Derren Brown for real?

I'd like to see Derren Brown do that

>> ^arvana:
I really don't understand all of the negativity around this trick.  I haven't seen the explanation video, and by all accounts it was a disappointment, but this is quite a well-crafted trick.  Just because some people figured out how it was done does not make it bad — if you want, you can find explanations to every magic trick in existence.  The art is in the design and performance of the magic.


I think the objection is that in this day and age trick photography just isn't considered 'magic'. Post the exact video, with the exact same quality, on youtube with anybody else in Derren's place and the few that bother to notice will simply yell fake.

I think this is the point were Derren Brown jumped the shark.

Everything Derren Brown does is a weak sham. Everybody that's disappointed is just now buying into the fact that he's just a trickster? Most of his tricks involve people...an a LOT of them actors...KNOWN actors.

...just because he's not as fruity and stupid as Chris Angel, this guy has gotten away with way more crap that Chris got crucified for.

Your video, Derren Brown predicts the winning lottery numbers LIVE on TV, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Disappointingly lowbrow and unsophisticated for Derren Brown. What a shame.

The explanation video he does a long segment on the wisdom of crowds http://www.videosift.com/video/Wisdom-of-Crowds-Derren-Brown and tries to pretend 24 people guessed the lottery numbers by averaging 24 guesses.

This is the most retarded thing ever and really makes me lose all respect for the guy.
Imagine the lottery is one number from 1 to 10. If you took 24 guesses then the ONLY way a group could pick 1 is if nearly everyone picked 1.. or low numbers (ie. 10 people picked 2, 14 picked 1) In average the group picks numbers in the middle. It is a gaussian distribution when you average 24 randomly chosen numbers... (kind of like craps odds)

However, the lottery draw has equal chances of picking ANY number. So it would be impossible to pick lottery numbers this way, even if crowds COULD guess the correct number when averaged... This method could never work. It might work with candy in a jar, where people can guess over and under, but never a lottery number.

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He then goes on to suggest he rigged the lottery with weighted balls so they would be lighter and his numbers were pre-chosen months ahead as an insider snuck in these balls, and then removed them after the lottery. Of course this is stupid because someone would have played those numbers, and it's dumb to suggest rigged lottery, as obviously people would have tried it before and gotten rich.

>> ^rychan:
What is the .gif trying to show?


That some images are more compressed than others.

It's fake, he does it like derren brown did the national lottery prediction.

See he's using a 16-way split screen with 16 guys holding the rocks but each image overlaps to cover where the hands are. The only difficult bit was how he managed to get the randomised waves in each of the 16 segments to sync up to make a natural looking sea/lake.

Nice try bill dan, but you gotta get up pretty early in the morning to slip a 16-way split screen and wave synchronisation past me. Amateur.

I wonder how Derren Brown would do on the program.

His use of 'NLP' in the majority of his tricks is a running joke among magicians. It is the 'trick' behind most of what he does only in the sense that he is performing conventional sleight of hand and other tricks, but covering it with talk of NLP. It's much like magicians in the 40's talking about black magic or African voodoo being behind the sleights they are performing. The thing is that Derren Brown has just done an exceptionally good job of making it look like NLP is the only explanation for the effects he performs.

One example would be his trick where he gets a person to pull a coin out of their pockets and hold in their fists while Derren's back is turned. He then names the year the coin was printed. He doesn't succeed everytime, but most of the time he gets it dead on or very close. He has revealed though that real trick though is that he somehow came to know that 1992 was by far the most printed year for a specific coin in Britain. All he needed to do was select people who had that particular coin and bias them to choosing that particular coin. Pure chance from that point was enough. By all appearances to everyone though it looks like an impossible task without some kind of bizarre explanation like NLP or reading body gestures.

Very nice Derren Brown vid you just posted, don't forget to upvote it yourself. I've got a playlist of Derren Brown if you want to see more: http://www.videosift.com/playlists/rasch187/Derren-Brown-Tricks-of-the-mind

And welcome to the sift btw