David Copperfield writes in The Onion

Or so The Onion claims. I've been reading the article almost but not quite entirely sure it's satire. Such is the problem with politics these days. 

“Right away there was the issue of accountability. In the aftermath of Trump’s surprise victory, we realized the American people deserved better from their magicians. It didn’t matter if you were working birthday parties or headlining the MGM Grand. You had to take a real honest look at what you did and accept that whether you were making a playing card disappear, pushing a cigarette through a quarter, or levitating over the Grand Canyon, your actions would be judged in the context of an entirely new political climate.

With Trump peddling fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, we could no longer remain silent: We had an obligation, both as illusionists and Americans, not to allow such hateful behavior to become normalized.”

One pieces that I found rather interesting:

“Though much of what we as Americans hold sacred has come under threat this past year, there has been at least one positive development: Many magicians no longer saw their female assistants in half, having come to realize that there are now consequences for such behavior in the workplace.”

Magicians have a history of being not so nice to women (and often our audiences in general), something I've tried very hard to not emulate for my entire career. 

Tax Cuts Explained with Magic Tricks

I post this only because it contains magic tricks... as someone who was forced to learn the math behind the Laffer Curve in university.

Life, The Universe and Everything (Scientific)

Physicist Sean Carroll is one of my favourite living humans. He currently teaches at CalTech where he has the desk which belonged to (the legendary) Richard Feynman, one of my favourite dead humans. He gave a talk at The Royal Institution in the UK about his latest book, The Big Picture. 

One of the greatest things to happen in the past ten years was YouTube's removal of the 10-minute time limit on videos. Now entire talks like this one are available to view world-wide for free in quality comparable to your television. The amount of learning that's now possible for people who don't want to spend weeks sitting through courses that aren't connected with their jobs is unbelievable.

I think that's important because the progress of science has been so fast. Many things that are now well-established facts were, a generation ago, unanswerable mysteries. So those subjects needed to be treated with polite agnosticism. I love Sean's ability to gently but firmly articulate what we do and don't know about those deep once-mysterious questions. It turns out we do know how our species got here, what happens when we die and whether or not you can bend spoons with your mind or talk to the dead.  

Enjoy The BIg Picture:

Q&A

There's also a short Q&A which follows his talk which was posted separately.

And this is not the first time I've shared a talk from The Royal Institution. A pair of free tickets to the first person who can identify the historical significance of that oddly shaped desk Sean is standing behind in the video in the comments.

A Magician Explains Quantum Mechanics

Ever since I first watched Richard Feynman's Messenger lecture where he gave an introduction to the famous "double-slit" experiment, I've been fascinated by quantum physics. (Actually, my earliest exposure was in the Michael Crichton novel Timeline, but his explanation was misleading, invented in order to service the plot and allow time travel to medieval France.) It is a topic which seems to actively resist being understood, where many of the experiments designed to tease out what was actually going on, produced surprising counter-intuitive results. And yet, despite all its mystery, if you just knuckle down and do that math by brute force, the theory works. The magic of the universe, I suppose...

Anyway, a handsome young magician from Vancouver, and a handsome female assistant hiding behind a screen attempt to explain quantum mechanics... sort of. As modern TV teaches us, the essential ingredient in teaching anything on the internet is getting a woman to take her clothes off. And, as Bill Nye teaches us, the essential ingredients necessary for explaining science are suspenders and a bow tie!

Note, for those who think it's exploitative and sexist for him to make a woman get undressed for magic, here's a clip of him in a speedo for magic. 

Questioning Assumptions or... proof that math teachers are evil

Magic teaches us to be constantly be looking at the world around us with a critical eye and to always be giving a second thought to things which appear, on the surface, to be completely obvious. Rushing through a problem trying to get to the solution as quickly as possible carries the risk of missing something important; something you believed to be true without realizing it. (And because you weren't consciously aware of believing it, you never gave yourself the opportunity to question it!)

For some, this exercise will be a delightful exercise in testing and challenging assumptions. For others, it will simply be the long-awaited proof that all math and science teachers are inherently pure evil. 

James "The Amazing" Randi

The Canadian magician and escape artist James Randi has become best known for his work as a paranormal investigator. It's a crusade of sorts to fight for people's right not to be cheated out of their money by people claiming abilities they don't have.

Magicians are practitioners of deception, but there's an ethics to deception and we often walk a very fine line trying to squeeze every last piece of wonder and amazement out of the world while recognizing that in order for society to flourish, people need to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. 

This short interview was filmed by Seth Andrews, who produces The Thinking Atheist podcast, at the 2017 American Atheists convention in Charlottesville. (Hundreds of atheists gathered together to watch an eclipse... what could be wrong with that?)