Bok och bibliotek – Sweden's biggest book fair

As a part of my involvement in Vetenskap och folkbildning (the Swedish sceptics) I recently visited the biggest book fair in Sweden. The book fair took place between the 22nd and 25th this month and is a great place to meet some interesting people.

The first person that I ran into was Mattias Ribbing who I met earlier at a lecture he did for the Swedish Magic Circle about how to improve your memory. And the last I ran into was the expert on rhetoric Elaine Eksvärd, who I last met at the political week at Almedalen but then her name was Bergqvist (congratulations delivered).
In between these two I talked to people like Jonas Hallberg, Martin Lind, Bo Berggren, and Ulf Danielsson who all came by our booth. But I also met a lot of less famous people including a number of old classmates from my studies in physical-chemistry, psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, don't ask me what they were all doing there. And I also met a few fans from my television appearances earlier this year.

Part of my work in the booth consisted in attracting visitors, or perhaps more aptly put luring people in once they had shown an initial interest. This is what the author Peter Olausson has to say about my contribution

Notera att publiken här varken är besökare eller utställare utan Svenska Mässans byggpojkar. När man har sitt jobb på mässan, alla dagar, så kan man tänka sig att det ska något särskilt till för att de ska stanna vid en monter och låta sig underhållas.

Translation:
Note that the audience is neither visitors nor exhibitioners but the Swedish fairs construction workers. When you work at the fair, all days, you could think that something extraordinary is required in order for them to stop by a booth and be entertained.

As an additional comment I can say that they came back with some friends the next day.

In all it was a very pleasant experience to be back in Gothenburg and at the book fair. I enjoyed meeting the people that came to the boot and who worked at the boot. I also really enjoyed meeting my brothers who live in the city and other friends who reside there. I hope I will have the opportunity to go there next year as well (the fair) or perhaps sooner (the city).

The hard life of a competing mentalist

It is now Tuesday and I have finally the strength to write about my experiences on the cruise arranged by Magiska Bröderna (a fraternity for magicians) in honour of their 70 year anniversary.
The cruise was on Birka Paradise a smaller cruise ship, between Saturday and Sunday and took about 22 hours. During the cruise we magicians had seminars to attend, shows to watch (the shows were also open to the public), and there was also a competition.

I am quite hesitant when it comes to competing in magic since I think it is difficult to compete in art in general but I made an exception this time since I thought it could be fun and the concept was a bit different. The competition was divided in two parts. First every magician/mentalist walked around the boat and performed for the passengers. The passengers voted for the different artist and the four best got to meet in a final judged by magicians

I really liked to do the strolling mentalism part since I got to meet different people and I had the feeling that the crowed slightly changed over time. Since I performed from around eight in the evening till four in the morning, with just a few brakes to eat and attend the shows and lectures, I got to see all the different passengers, from the families with small children to the younger crowed. I also got up quite early to meet people for breakfast at about seven and get some more votes before the end of the competition.
Any one who wants to know more about the cruise and knows Swedish can read about it at Christer Nilssons blog magi-arkivet.

A few interesting and out of the ordinary things happened during my time with the passengers. A number of people actually recognised me from my television appearance in Fenomen and that was a glad surprise. I also had one person who insisted on trying to wrestle me to the ground whenever he was fooled by an effect, he continued to try that until security turned up and hoovered around. I guess one could describe it as my first experience of having to need security to protect me from my fans. But to be honest the guy did it in a very playful way and had no intention of hurting me.

The same playfulness was absent from the guy who threatened me early in the morning, exactly what he was threatening me with is hard to say since he only said that I would be sorry if I didn't stop talking to this one girl. Even if it was his girlfriend I would not have yielded for such behaviour since I was only doing my “job” but she didn't even know him. The girl herself was not making it easy for me since she didn't know Swedish or English and we had to resort to French as our lingua franca.

There was also another girl in a white mask who had a very confrontational attitude and wanted to control the workings of the effect, handle the cards herself and all of those things that ordinary magicians hate. Unfortunately her friends dragged her away before I had a chance to finish what I was doing.

I know that about four hundred of the 1200 passengers voted for a magician but I have no idea who managed to get the most votes but I know that I got to the final with three other performers. Unfortunately it didn't go so well in the final, maybe because I only did two effects and one of the effects had unbeknownst to me been performed in the dealer show a few hours earlier although with a different method.

This is what my place looks like... You should see it when it's not in order.

It might be hard to imagine that this is the home of such a highly organized individual as me. But there is a story behind this total chaos. The story itself is a bit chaotic but in the middle of the picture, somewhat to the right side, it is possible to see some flat brown boxes from IKEA. They are only a part of the boxes I brought home to replace the furniture that used to contain most of the stuff in the picture.
The entire operation of replacing the furniture was improvised in its execution although I had planned to do it for quite some time. It was also done with a time limit, something I cannot recommend.

Rain, the autumn is here

I returned to Uppsala after having been back home in Dalarna for a few weeks. Travelling by train in this country seems nowadays to imply a late arrival at your destination, but I was pleased that I was no more than seven minutes late when I got of the train. Soon this satisfaction dissipated as the minutes proved to be of greater importance than I had anticipated. In fact it dissipated in water in a weather that can be described as heavy showers mixed with very heavy showers.



The weather in Uppsala

As I progressively made my way back home from cover to cover despite having an umbrella I gave some thought to my resent travels. There might be some comments on my adventures posted here soon including suicide attempts in Visby, late night activities in Las Vegas, and sightseeing in New York.



It is not a real castle, it is not the Statue of Liberty, it is not the Eiffel tower, it can only be Las Vegas.



A visit to Houdini's tomb

A new book, a new friend

I know some people consider books to be their friends but this is not about that. I promised to give a review of Elaine Bergqvists book ”Snacka snyggt” and here it is. In case someone wants prof that I actually met her just look at the photo below.
I read Elaine's book on the way over to the US and in my opinion it is very much what it claims to be, a book about modern rhetoric and aimed at people that want good advice fast. Now Elaine is very charming and I suppose that is why I remembered her from the time we first met, God knows why she remembered me. What makes her charming is probably her energy and openness and it shows in the book. Any one who reads “Snacka snyggt” will feel that they have met Elaine on a personal level, not just because she is the model for the illustrations in the book. This is of course very smart since she is selling her services as a consultant besides writing books. In a way the book is a marketing tool, and more so than for most authors.
What the reader takes away from the book depend of course on their situation but it is all good advice my only complaint is that there is no apparent order in how things are presented in the book. The order in which different aspects are discussed appear almost random and although a lot of the advice pertain to several rhetorical situations in many cases she jumps between talking about what to do if meeting some one person to person, having a conversation or a presentation for a small group or talking to a larger group of people.
The book is full of exempla, that is examples of what she is talking about, or one might prefer to call it anecdotes about what Elaine or someone she knows did in certain situations. It is a part of the presentation of the author and it is as all sceptics should know, not really evidence that the rhetorical advice is good. But this book is not an academic work, there are no footnotes and my guess is that it is not aimed at an audience that is concerned with that. Elaine uses a number of secondary sources and as already said there are no footnotes for the concerned reader. One of her sources is Henrik Féxeus who is a liar and a cheat as all mentalist, but I was pleased that she also used “Skeptiker skolan” by my friends Andreas Anundi and C.J. Åkerberg as a source and recommended it. As can be seen in the photo Elaine likes scepticism and no one need to be overly sceptical to the advice in her book, it is just not an academic work.

It is on the other hand a book that takes up aspects of rhetoric that is hard to find in many other books. There is a big chapter on colours, and there is discussions about music and how it can be used in a presentation. There are some good advice about how to use power point something that older books in rhetoric may not have.
I think it is a good book for anyone who just wants some help with their presentation of them selves and what they have to say but who do not have the time to become an expert. It does require a lot of hard work and perhaps some talent, to become a good talker that can catch peoples attention and form their world view. Because that is what a good presenter does, he or she, gives the audience a perspective of the world that makes the proposition that the presenter gives seem logical and correct.
One thing I had hoped Elaine had done more with is the myth about body language, she does point out a few things to prevent people to over interpret body language. But as is shown from an anecdote told by Derren Brown body language does not always work as people believe it does. Derren once asked an audience how he had been able to tell when a spectator was lying and when the spectator was telling the truth. People in the audience was sure that the spectator had looked away when she was lying although the opposite was true. Sometimes a person who lies is very careful to look you in the eyes because they believe that someone who lies would not do that.
The main myth about body language is that it makes up a certain percentage of our communication. That is absurd in many ways. Body language is important when it comes to how people perceive us. If you tell people that you are really sad but you look happy an audience will believe your body language more than your words, and this is probably where the myth comes from. But if you tell people that the speed that an object falls with is independent of the weight of the object if air resistance can be excluded there is no way that your body language does most of the communication. It would have been nice if someone made a distinction between information content and the rhetorical task of getting people to like you so that they will accept what you say.

To summarise, buy Elaine's book if you want some good advice that can help you be a better speaker and is not that much concerned with theoretical issues, and buy the book if you are already an accomplished speaker because you will find new ideas and perspectives in this book.

If this review appear to be a bit short please remember that I am in Las Vegas, there are other things to do here.

What I did on Gotland besides what I was there for...

A serious blogger updates their blog at least three times a day, that is one of the things that I have learned from my trip to Gotland. I will write about the important thing I did on Gotland but another thing I learned as a result of my trip to Sweden's largest island was that people that read a blog want to get to know the person behind the blog.
So I can tell you that right now I am in a hotel room in Las Vegas, very far from Gotland, I am here for The Amazing Meeting 9 and I will soon have to write a lot more about this convention. I just ran into Banachek, a great mentalist and one reason I became an honest liar. But enough about now, let us look into the past.
After performing at Strings 2011 at Uppsala Castle, I packed my stuff and left for Gotland 1 July. The reason I went to Gotland and Almedals veckan was to do some volunteer work for the Swedish sceptics, Vetenskap och folkbildning (VoF). It was my first visit to Gotland and I did not know what to expect, I sure did not expect to run into so many people I knew on the ferry, but it is logical that you will run into people you know there. I first met some old colleagues from the department och Physical Chemistry and then some even older friends from back home in Dalarna, finally I ran into the president of the Swedish humanist society (Humanisterna) Christer Sturmark.
The first days were quite relaxed with only preparing things for our important demonstration that was to take place on Thursday. I had the opportunity to meet a few interesting people at a barbeque at the place we were living I also got to visit the largest ice-cream bar in Sweden with 120 flavours of ice-cream.
At the first day of handing out leaflets about our suicide attempt I ran into a person at the library in Visby. We (the activist) were about to occupy a table and I wanted to make sure that we did not disturb the girl at the table next to ours. I was startled, I had seen her before but could not place her right away. Elaine Bergqvist is a rhetoric consultant and we met very briefly at Missionskyrkan in Uppsala still we both recognised each other for some reason and my excuse and her reply was not exactly rhetorically correct since we were both surprised and thinking about were we had seen the other person before. It's from her book the advise about how you write a blog comes. I picked it up the day after I saw her and made sure to get it signed. Since I believe that I know a thing or two about rhetoric myself I have written a review, to be published here shortly.
Besides being activists and handing out leaflets we also tried to find others with the same interests in science and scepticism. We managed to meet a few at some interesting seminars but we were also interested in free food and got invitations to a session sponsored by an advertising firm. We were probably in no way the right kind of guests from the advertisings firms point of view but through connections we managed to get in. I really didn't think I would meet anyone there to talk to. It turned out that I was wrong apparently I'm quite well connected. I met not one, not two, but three different people from different organisations at that party that I already knew from before. It was a surprise to both myself and to my two friends who didn't recognised anyone.
That is about everything I did on Gotland apart from the important suicide attempt and a small miracle at a lecture about alternative medicine. And on the way home I once again met my old colleagues from my time at the department of Physical Chemistry, proving that it is indeed a small world.

Assumptions

Right now I'm on my way to Gotland, though I am not sure when this will be posted. For some reason I assume that I will have some sort of Internet connection during my stay on the island but I have no idea about how and when; we do tend to assume a lot in life.
I am sure I will have plenty of time to post about my activities, planned and accomplished on Gotland later, that is if that Internet access materialize. So now a few lines about my recent performances at Uppsala castle for some of the brightest minds in the world.
I might have exaggerated some but theoretical physicists tend to be sharp and this was an international conference with some of the really well known names. Strings 2011 was actually to be visited by Stephen Hawking but unfortunately he had to cancel for health reasons. If people think that theoretical physicists much be serious and solemn people but that is not at all the case. In deed they were a very good crowed to perform for, but also extremely inquisitive.
As always I never confirm or deny any of the suggested explanations that I get to hear but in a room with scientist you know that some will be try to analyse everything and you can learn a lot from listening to what really intelligent people have to say about your show.
One group in the audience worked through the routines in a very scientific manner. They made some interesting assumptions. They assumed that I was working alone, and since I have no visible assistant that is understandable. In big productions invisible assistants can be very useful. They also assumed that I had not had any time to prepare something with any of the people attending the dinner a head of time. For conferences held in Uppsala this might prove a useful assumption, I will say no more on the matter. The third thing they assumed was that all the effect had to be bullet proof. That what I did would always produce the desired result.
I can not confirm or deny that these assumptions are correct, but I am happy that I got them so that I can take advantage of that in the future; we do tend to assume a lot in life.

P.S.
The blog post above did not start out as a text about assumptions, it was first when I was writing the last sentence that I realised the very obvious theme in the text. Sleep deprivation can apparently lead to interesting effects.