Dustings of Woofle #27
/Did you guys see this unsettling image put out by the World Health Organization to demonstrate the horrifying effects of disuse-induced muscular atrophy over time?
To see the sad progression—from a robust healthy specimen; to someone who has lost so much muscle mass in his chest that he can no longer fill out the shirt collar that droops flaccidly around his neck; to, finally, a hunched crone whose limbs you could crack like kindling—is devastating.
Drink your milk, folks. And hit the gym.
Here’s some more bad equivoque for you. This is what happens when you get caught up in the idea that equivoque is inherently fooling. It’s not. And when you take 90 seconds to force one side of an invisible die in a meandering nonsensical way, you’re not going to be able to convince anyone it’s anything other than verbal ambiguity.
No one would experience that and say, “You’ll never believe what happened! I freely chose which two sides of an invisible die to cover up. Then I freely chose which two of the remaining numbers to give to the magician. Then we hung the remaining numbers invisibly in the air, and again I freely chose which one to hand to the magician. And he knew I’d keep the three!”
To be fair, any type of equivoque used to force a number on a die is probably not going to go over well. Any manner of choosing the number on a die (visible or invisible) that doesn’t involve simply rolling it is going to feel needlessly complicated.
This video also reminds me of a conclusion I came to a little while ago that equivoque doesn’t work well with 3-6 items. It works well with a lot of items. And it works well with 2 (and it’s really effective with 1). But with just a handful of options, it makes less sense to break up the selection process into steps (which is usually what equivoque requires).
If you have a little time to burn, check out this video that Calen Morelli put out late last year. I found it to be a really worthwhile watch and it hasn’t gotten nearly enough views.
I mentioned in this post an idea I had to float someone’s hair with a loop, and how I gave up on the idea. But Calen actually does it in this video and gets a good reaction, so maybe I was too quick to abandon the idea. [Update: Calen tells me he published the idea in 2014, which makes sense. Looking back now, I think I got the idea to float someone’s hair with loops after doing Calen’s floating hoodie string from his Penguin lecture. So I was circling the same thought process he was playing around with a few years earlier.]
There is a lovely coins through sheet of glass effect around 6:40 into the video. I was really blown away by it when I saw it initially. When I showed it to some non-magician friends, they liked it, but not nearly as much as I did. That experience was the impetus for me writing The Bubble series of posts from back in February. Magicians will have the understanding to appreciate how pretty this version is, even more so than laypeople. That’s not to say it’s a trick “for” magicians, just that there are elements of it that magicians might be more amazed at than non-magicians.
The whole thing is a good watch, with a bunch of nice magic moments throughout. And it’s really well shot and produced. (Although the audio drops out at one point (due to a copyright claim) so be prepared to do some a cappella singing on your own at that point to keep the groove going. Might I recommend this hot beat? skee-dop-doo doo doo doo skee-dop-doo dee!)