Magic



When I was young I wanted to be a magician, and spent hours practising coin and card tricks, shaking my hands at the end of my wrists and doing everything the book my parents gave me said to do. Alas, so far this ambition has come to nothing, but I still love that there are magicians in the world. These days I've got an extra reason for loving it: they are generally the staunchest enemies of the irrationalism that's rampant these days. The Amazing James Randi, for example, demonstrated how to bend a spoon at a time when Uri Geller had the press convinced that he could do it by his mind alone, and, with donations from fellow skeptics and sceptics, has put up a 1.1 million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate genuine paranormal powers.

So I was totally delighted by this, a TED lecture from 2004. I love the TED site's description of Keith Barry as a hacker of the human brain:


Posted: Mon - May 4, 2009 at 06:26 PM           |

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