magic is about honesty
everything here is true
except for the bits I made up
Bayes' Theorem, discovered by the Reverend Thomas Bayes in the eighteenth century. When you have something you're not sure of, it's the calculation you perform to update your belief when you encounter new evidence. It's essentially the mathematical underpinning of the scientific method and it's an incredibly valuable thing to understand.
All that coolness aside, this is still the most badass titles for a statistics lesson!
When the TIFF Bell LIghtbox Opened in Toronto in 2010, I was invited to perform as part of that celebration. As part of their opening season, they wanted to explore the earliest origins of film and that led them to magicians.
In fact, it was a particular magician, George Melies, who is widely regarded as the father of film editing (and therefore camera tricks.) Before Melies, films were recorded in one continuous take. A feature that we all take for granted now, the ability to take multiple pieces of footage and cut them together to form a coherent narrative, was something he discovered by accident.
Crash Course, an interesting YouTube channel that produces educational contact, did a wonderful piece summarizing this history.
Of course, magicians typically work in the opposite way, going to extreme lengths to produce feats which look like camera tricks. But ultimately, they all come from the same place.
