It's fucking chilling. Just imagine walking down the road and hearing the drone coming up on you. Too far away to defend from, out of nowhere, gun pointing right at you. Fuck.

Like I said in my first post above my little brother is a professional magician who designs a lot of these tricks and devices for TV shows. All I can say is you'd be amazed the lengths a magician will go to just to make a simple looking trick work. I think you'd be fascinated by it all.

The Magic Circle is a good organisation to join if you have an interest in magic. You need to be able to perform magic and be interested in learning how to do more, but that's all part of the fun.

An interesting aside about magical devices, they are never patented, as patent applications have to be made public. This means the devices themselves tend to be pretty expensive as the inventor may have only a short period of time in which to sell his idea before others start joining in. Simple magical effects (just the method for a trick printed on a piece of paper) can sometimes sell for hundreds of pounds. Everything about the magical world is strange and different. If you've got a keen mind and the technical know-how there may be gold in them thar hills for you

This is awesome

Magicians will go to amazing lengths to get a trick to work. However, the key part to just about all tricks is distraction. Not just to make you look away when a clever switch is made, but a well designed trick is a distraction in itself. It'll make you think that the amazing thing happening is one thing when in fact the amazing thing already happened when you didn't know amazing things were happening and now it's making the faux amazing thing look even more amazing!

Your idea with the ink disappearing on the card is a great example. You're trying to work out how the card ends up blank when he put the signed card on the table when the signed card was never put on the table. The card on the table is blank simply because he put a blank card on the table. The switch had already been made and you're looking for a solution to something that was never a problem

Magicians prey on you assumptions, and they're brazen, and a lot more skilled than you'd think. You won't work a lot of the stuff out because you'll think the way it's done is impossible, that no one could actually do what the magician is doing. Fan some cards out in front of someone and ask them to pick one at random. A good card magician can force you to pick a certain card and you'd never suspect it. I'm given to believe that Paul Daniels can do this behind his back. It's not easy to do and most people don't believe it's possible, so if you can do it you're performing the miracle at the very start. Everything after that seems incredible. You're looking for a trick that's already happened.

I love magic. I love being fooled. I enjoy the challenge of working out how things are done and wish I had the time to learn to do it properly.

That's the obvious one, there's no way Penn and Teller didn't know how that's done (it's behind his right hand then he drops it into a pocket in his trousers).

Also, in all of this remember that Penn and Teller are showmen. How would the show look if they just sat there and said 'yeah, well, we know how all that's done' every time?

Well, you'd better avoid 99% of videos of magic tricks then.

Try and figure it out. For me that's part of the fun. How did he do that? How is it possible? If I can't figure it out then he's done a great job. Why can't you just take pleasure in being amazed?

To be fair this was hardly a top to bottom technical exposé of the process...

Love stuff like this. He's got some really nice little bits in there, bit's I've not seen before. Like Penn said there were some bits I caught, but some bit's that were extremely well done. All this needs is a little refinement and it'll be amazing.


For reference I have high standards when it come to magic (by which I mean I'm not easily fooled). My little brother is a professional magician who designs tricks for TV shows, I'm used to seeing very good magic done very well and this guy is up there.

God he's good at this. Brilliant

Be a hero? Stuff like this is cool to watch, but heroic? No.

A hero is someone who does what's needed for the greater good, despite the implications to themselves. Wingsuit flyers aren't doing anyone any good, except themselves and their sponsors. They're having fun, not putting themselves out for others.

I'm happy to watch this stuff, and upvoted the video, just think GoPro are taking the piss with the hero bit.

Here's Lewis Hamilton back in his karting days. Last place to first in 3/4 laps, against an experienced field in top karts!

https://youtu.be/xDgpS4kx88s

To be fair I'd love to know where 'leave on the floor with a raging bull you've just thrown sand in the face of' is on your list of perfect responses.

Hugely satisfying to watch. What the hell did he expect?

I love mechanical elegance like this. Electronics can do all sorts of fabulous things these days but it's all gone way beyond my understanding. I'm sure there is every bit as much elegance in good programming as there is here but I just can't see it, understand it.

This is such an elegant and simple mechanism, every bit does what it needs to do, and integrates perfectly with all the other parts. Everything just works together as it should. Beautiful.

Weight distribution is just as important too. the beetle has the engine right at the back sot he weight is over the driven wheels. Very little weight up front and the body is relatively tall. That means from the start the rear wheels grip and bite hard, then any weight shift as the car accelerates and the front lifts puts more weight to the rear axle meaning even more grip. Beetles win drag races in the first 20m or so. As you can see in this video the difference in speed in the first second or two is massive. Stop the video at 39 seconds and you'll see in that first launch the beetle has gone twice as far as the mustang. That speed difference that early on is very hard to catch up.

Both mechanisms involve wheels, but beyond that there's no similarity. The bike would still stay upright if the tyres had no width at the point of contact with the ground, so there was no increase nor decrease in the diameter of the wheel as the bike leaned.