How to beat a chess grandmaster

Watch as magician Derren Brown beats a room full of grandmasters and other top chess players even though he doesn't really play chess all that well. At the end, he explains how he did it...it's a dead simple clever method.

The CIA magic book

The Boston Globe has a slideshow with a few examples from the now-declassified Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.

Here's the associated article. One could imagine a Mad Men/Bond-style spy show set in the 1960s that would utilize these techniques.

Ricky Jay

Can you resist reading an article that starts off with an anecdote this interesting? I couldn't.

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

"Three of clubs," Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, "Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card."

After an interval of silence, Jay said, "That's interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time."

Mosher persisted: "Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card."

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, "This is a distinct change of procedure." A longer pause. "All right-what was the card?"

"Two of spades."

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

That's from a 1993 profile of Ricky Jay, who is probably more well known now for his acting (Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Deadwood, The Spanish Prisoner, The Prestige) than his magic scholarship. Check out a couple of Jay's tricks on YouTube: Four Queens and Sword of Vengence. (via df)

The Neuroscience of Illusion

In a bit of a sequel to Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer talks to Teller (of Penn and Teller) and learns how the tricks that magicians do can be explained by neuroscience.

Our brains don't see everything -- the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules. "Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology," Teller says. "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind."

Galangal

Related to ginger, galangal has been used since medieval times to spice food and quell digestive issues, but it doesn't taste like your friendly, corner-store ginger candy.

If you were to bite into this tuberous rhizome, you would be very surprised at the slightly sweet, "perfumy" taste and scent of it, not to mention the spiciness factor. While not exactly "hot" like a chili, galangal has a sharp pungency to it that will make you gasp and perhaps cough a little.

Galangal's role outside the kitchen includes a place in folk medicine and hoodoo magic, where it's called "Chewing John." If you're entering litigation and require a favorable verdict, you're supposed to chew it thoroughly before spitting it onto the floor of the courtroom.

If only Blake Griffin of the Sooners had hocked a ginger loogie yesterday, North Carolina would have been sent packing.

Video demonstrations of 20 magic tricks.

Video demonstrations of 20 magic tricks.