A short update before the storm

Here in Sweden Midsummer is an important holiday and I spent it in Dalarna, the region of Sweden that I am from and also a region famous for its Midsummer celebrations that are very much according to all traditions. (I am not going to go into details about all the different types of celebrations but let us say that some of them involve large amounts of alcohol.)
What I enjoy with Midsummer is the sense of coming home, seeing people that you haven't seen in a very long time. And although I worked two of the days that I spent in Dalarna it felt very much as a holiday.
I even had plenty of time to reminiscence about when I lived in Dalarna. I found one train of thought particular interesting. I was walking by “Dalarnas regemente” that is the old army barracks in Falun. When I was living in the city we still had general conscription in Swede and the area was maybe not heavily guarded, but had barbed wire surrounding it and armed military guards at the entrances.
The thing is that I was heading for a place on the other side of the barracks and started to walk around it. But the entire barrack area have changed since Sweden changed to a having a professional army. It is now a business park with a lot of different companies. There are no armed guards, no barbed wire, not even a fence. Still I had begun to walk around the area.
I stopped and turned around, I had no reason to take the long way around, it was just out of habit that I started out on the usual way. But I actually had to stop and think about if I wanted to walk through the barracks area, it didn't feel right.
It is not that I had not been inside before. During my High School days I actually got inside once a week. My name was written down in a folder at the guard station among other people that practised fencing at the old gymnasium. Once I started my military service we were told that you could not get time of for participating in athletic events like football matches or things like that, but there were of course exceptions for certain sports with a more military flavour. So being a fencer had its privileges.
Maybe it was my experience of the area as an off limit and secure area that made it somewhat difficult to imagine that it could be possible to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifjust cross it to get to the other side. In this case my reasoning faculties won fairly easily over my emotional response and I crossed the old barracks-yard, walked passed the old gymnasium where we practised fencing so many years ago. It was a long time ago I was there the last time, it is perhaps our memories of times gone by that makes us feel old, but I found no discomfort in remembering. I just found my reaction to the change of reality compared to my memories very revealing.

But what about the storm? Later today (after I have slept a bit) I will be performing for the conference “Strings 2011” at Uppsala castle, and the next month is extremely busy with a lot of things to do, in fact there are only three days I don't have plans for up to and including the first week of August. If I find the time that might imply some interesting posts on this blog.

The trick that can be explained

In card magic there is one trick that requires a lot of experience and sometimes technical skill. It is called “the trick that cannot be explained” because well... you can't explain it. Though I understand that non-magicians might find it hard to believe that there might be a trick that has no explanation and want to learn more about it, I would like to talk a bout a trick that can be explained.

A few weeks ago I was recognized as being a mentalist, (it is amazing what a few minutes on national television can do for one's fame) and I had the opportunity to do this effect that I will now explain to you.

As we discuss mentalists and psychic abilities the person I am having the conversation with remarks on how he saw a mentalist on television and the mentalist had asked the audience to look at a person and try to feel what kind of drawing that person might do. Since he was able to “sense” what kind of picture the person on television had drawn he wondered if it really was possible to just look at a person and get such a feeling. He had done so himself but was still not convinced.
I concentrate and I tell the person, right there and then, what he managed to pick up from the person he saw on television. I tell him exactly what kind of object he was thinking of and I don't have him write anything down or choose something from a deck of cards.
After this feat I fight the urge to tell the person how I did it, the sense of wonder he feels does not deserve to be degraded by my mundane explanation.

I can explain the trick to you because I will never be able to perform this effect again and although I might perform many similar effects, that might involve you, this information will not help you the least.

The explanation is quite trivial as many explanations are. To be able to do this trick you need to know what show the person had seen and remember the picture the person on television drew. You also need to do this effect for a person that will rather believe that you managed to read them so well that you can tell what object they were able to pick up on a week ago, instead of just remembering what the picture was. And in my case you also need a person that has forgotten that you were the mentalist on television performing the effect in the first place.

Not so lucky

Every now and again the evening press manages to surprise me. Generally it is not in a positive way. Like this Saturday one of the major evening newspapers had this message:



For those of you that are not familiar with the Swedish language it says, loosely translated, “The 'lucky shops' that hand out big prizes in Uppsala”.

I know that the point of printing newspapers is to get people to read them, but either the journalists responsible think that their readers are idiots that deserve to be misinformed about how games of chance works or they are themselves misinformed and thus present us with the question how they managed to become journalists to begin with.

The fact is of course that a random event has no recollection of what has happened before. Even if you flip heads 10 times in a row the odds that you will get another head the next time is still 50%. There cannot be any such thing as a lucky shop when it comes to the games of chance.
I am willing to make an exception for betting games there some skill is involved. It is possible that people betting at one particular shop have more knowledge of horses or football teams, and that can give the shop an advantage.

Now I know I should not critique something I have not read, and I did not read the article in Expressen. It is perhaps unfair of me to assume that they don't explain the gambler's fallacy in the article, but I will assume that they also forgot to normalise their figures.
If one shop sells 10.000 lottery tickets and another shop sell 1.000 it is not surprising if the shop selling the larger number of tickets also have a larger number of big wins. I am almost ready to bet that the reporter forgot to do this simple thing.

I would hope that newspapers like Expressen, that are read by a lot of people, do not rely on luck when they write their news, but if they do they were not so lucky this time.