Why Card Tricks are Important at the Hamilton Fringe

I went to go see magician Chris Bruce at the Hamilton Fringe Festival last night. His show, Why Card Tricks Are Important, is part of the Fringe's "Gallery Series". It's an unusual collection of short shows — this one runs about twenty minutes — performed for much smaller audiences. The show contains — spoiler alert — card tricks. In fact it contains nothing which could not be called a card trick. They are spiffy and well-executed card tricks and fiercely interactive.

The burning question is whether or not the show could succeed in convincing someone that card tricks are, in fact, important. A more interesting question might be could anything convince you that card tricks were important. The answer is, unless you are slightly deranged, no... Unless you accept a perverse artistic meta-definition of important which allows that frivolous pursuits are important as a celebration of their own right to exist. After all, if we have a species have evolved to the point where we have so thoroughly beaten back the threats of disease, malnutrition, predators and war that we have the free time to wonder what exactly Justin Bieber is up to, isn't that a triumph worth celebrating?

For a magic show, or even a theatre presentation, it's an awkward time frame. At twenty minutes it's difficult to say hello and get through two substantive pieces before you're taking your bows. You're also spending more time getting your ticket and sitting in the theatre waiting for the show to start then you are watching the show. it would be better if someone could sit down and curate an hour or 90 minutes of complementary material so it feels like you got a little bang for your buck.

But if you're heading to the Hamilton Fringe festival, engage in something frivolously important and pick a card.

Why Card Tricks are Important has five performances left at Hamilton Artists Inc at the Hamilton Fringe Festival. Tickets ($8 with a $5 Hamilton Fringe backer button) are available at the door or online.

A Test of Confirmation Bias

The New York Times posted a quick puzzle test which you can try here. If you enjoy this sort of thing, it's a fairly standard number puzzle you may have seen before. But the results are extremely counterintuitive. Go try the test and see how you do before reading any further...

I'll wait... Promise.

I've known the answer since university (Math professors throw these things out all the time) and it highlights that the way most of us go about trying to solve problems the wrong way.

Everyone usually starts out right trying to generate some possible solutions - guesses at what the right answer might be. But then when it comes to choosing the best one, things get messy. The common belief is that we search for evidence which confirms our theory. It doesn't work, since one piece of evidence can be consistent with many different possible solutions, the fact that the piece of evidence agrees with any one solution, doesn't help picking one solution over another. Counter-intuitively, piling on more evidence that agrees with your hypothesis doesn't help distinguish one solution over another; it doesn't move you forward.

The correct path is the opposite direction. You go out in search of evidence which would go against your hypothesis. And if you try hard to find it and come up empty, then you can be confident. When it comes to deciding, one piece of inconsistent evidence is more valuable then a thousand pieces of consistent evidence.

Proudly and Pride-fully Canadian

Happy Canada Day! It's been a busy week filled with both rain, rainbows and no shortage of Magic! Distracting me from the (slightly damp) Pride Celebrations downtown we hosted a lecture with Norman Beck who was visiting from Texas for the uber-secret "31 Faces North" (so secret in fact that I'm not even allowed to admit to myself that I know about it.)

But before that, even before I got into the pride festivities, I learned about the United States' Supreme Courts' ruling on marriage equality. It was a fairly emotional morning. I was flipping through my RSS feed at just the right moment, before the blogosphere went nuts and there was just a single post from Joe My God and in the preview without the images it was just one line:

SCOTUS RULES FOR MARRIAGE!!!

I was alone and it was totally quiet and I just stopped. It's certainly not often, you can read a single line of text and know instantly that the world was not quite the same place it was yesterday.

In hindsight, it wasn't really that much of a surprise. But for a moment it was shocking and beautiful. Then the internet went nuts. Both people sharing the decision with excitement and people eagerly waiting to drink the tears of crushed conservative opponents.

But it's strange to watch the events in the US unfold from up in Canada. For us, when it comes to equality, the writing's been on the wall for a decade or two. I seemed to hit the tail end of it. When I was in high school it was still in vogue to use "gay" as a synonym for "stupid", "idiot" or "moron". But since so much of our culture seeps in from south of the border, it's been unusual to watch both the conservative doom and gloom proclamations and the slowly but steadily changing tide of support. It was clearly on the right track, but it wasn't clear that they were going to get it right. (At least not until a string of federal court decisions started swatting gay marriage bans like flies.) But soon it will feel like it couldn't have been any other way.

But within an hour or two social media became a rainbow explosion and colourful striped pictures what was particularly moving was seeing photos from our show turning up with rainbows. These are the ones I saw, but I'm sure there were a few more.

Of course, for anyone who's been paying attention, we've been celebrating Pride on the show for essentially the whole month. Now that it's July, I can shelve the rainbow duct tape for another year. Although I think the unicorn might stay. Not sure yet.

A Surprising Twist on a Science Demonstration

I stumbled across this while watching the Walter Lewin MIT Physics lectures. Fortunately, it also appears as a stand alone video (isn't YouTube wonderful?) so you don't have to watch an hour on kinetic friction coefficients. But you could if you wanted to. In magic there is a dramatic device known as the "kicker ending", which involves adding on an additional incongruous climax following the apparent ending to a trick. For example, you remove a pack of cards from its box, perform a brief trick and when you try to return the cards to the box, you discover that it is now filled with a block of ice. Essentially, you turn your magic show into an episode of Family Guy.

Magicians will sit up in bars and coffee shops for ridiculous amounts of time debating the merits of this type of dramatic structure. But I never thought I would see it used in a physics demonstration. Just trust me when I say, you will not see this ending coming:

Remembering Names

Performing a lot, I get introduced to a lot of new people and remembering names is tough. I actually have an extremely good memory, probably just a bit shy of what most people would label as freak-status, but names are difficult. Part of it is that my memory is poorly focused: I remember a ton pretty accurately but not necessarily the things I wanted to remember. I'm very good at remembering names, and very good at remembering faces, and absolutely awful at remembering which name goes with which face. A few nights ago at a show, I was so incredibly relieved that both of the people up on stage with me were named Carol, I was grinning for the entire length of the trick.

None of this was really news to me, but I know many people, performers included, who face similar problems and maybe this will be helpful.

They're clever and they're Canadian.

The twisted mind of a mathematician

The domain where I've had the the most — what you might call — formal academic training is mathematics. Having spent years tutoring students in math (which means, by implication you're spending time with students who are less adept than the average at math) I understand that there is a definite peculiarity in the way people approach problems in math. Ordinary thinking involves guessing an answer — taking a shot in the dark — then trying to justify the guess as quickly as possible so you can move on to new problems. This manifests with students prepping for multiple choice tests saying something like, "It's B, isn't it?". And if I nod yes, they're right and they get to go onto the next question. But, as happens more often, I don't nod and that guess hasn't brought them any closer to a solution to the problem.

Math involves stepping back and looking at the problem from many different angles. It seems extraordinarily counter-intuitive if your goal is simply to get the pencil mark in the bubble for B.

Professor Persi Diaconis, in addition to being a professor of statistics, is also a world renowned magician, so when his work pops up in my news feed, I perk up. This is a wonderful example of the application of mathematical thinking to a very mundane problem. I guess the typical reaction to be a transition from this guy's so weird to this guy's so freakin' smart.