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Phenomenon

I watched this new show called Phenomenon on Wednesday. Basically, it’s American Idol with magicians (mentalists, to be specific). Criss Angel plays the part of Simon Cowell, and Uri Geller plays the part of Paula Abdul.

First of all, I loved the show. It’s all done live (supposedly), which gives it a realistic feeling that you don’t get with a lot of modern magic on TV (e.g., Mindfreak or David Blaine’s specials). The guy with the nailgun was particularly intense; you know he probably won’t screw it up, but just knowing there’s a small chance he’ll puncture his brain on live television is enough to keep it interesting. The bear trap guy was less impressive. Dude, you didn’t even hide the fact that you switched the trap. And are you in pain or not? At least keep your act consistent.

But there is a degree of confusion in this show that sorta pisses me off. On one hand, there’s Uri Geller there, who claims to have “real” psychic abilities. In the introductions to the contestants, some of them told stories about sensing the death of a loved one, or whatever. The show seems to foster the belief that these people really do read minds.

On the other hand, Criss Angel is there. I think Criss Angel is awesome. If you watch carefully, you see that his approach is actually quite skeptical. On his show, he sometimes reveals how he did his tricks. He refers to his feats as “illusions” or “demonstrations”, and never claims to have any supernatural abilities. I think this was epitomized in one episode of Mindfreak, when he spent the entire episode putting on a seance and freaking people out by having them see and feel ghosts. At the very end of the show, he said something like “so do you believe in ghosts now? I don’t.” Nice. On Phenomenon, these people are illusionists; what they do is amazing, but not supernatural. They can make it look like they are reading minds, but they are not. It’s awe-inspiring in a similar manner to really good special effects in a movie. You almost believe it’s real, but you know it’s not.

Phenomenon can’t decide if it’s trying to amaze us by tricking us into thinking it’s real, or by showing us really good performances by people who we know are trying to trick us. Now, you know I’m not one to completely dismiss psychic phenomena. There’s something to them, and they’re worth researching scientifically. But nobody in their right mind is going to believe that flawless mindreading is going to happen on a reality show (nor any other silly game). I’d be more impressed if the show was up front about that.

My guess is that Uri Geller prevents it. He wants people to believe that stage magic is a genuine demonstration of psychic abilities, so that his own stage magic thrives. The dude does some impressive stuff, but come on, he can’t really bend spoons with his mind. Again, with him, I’d be more impressed if he didn’t put on the whole “everything I do is because I’m actually psychic” act. He did a demonstration of his “abilities” live on the show, by having the audience choose a symbol (one of the five Zener card symbols) that he had sealed in an envelope. It just barely worked out – and hey Uri, any chance you always pick the star in demonstrations like this? How about randomly selecting the symbol next time?

Anyway, like I said, loved the show, but I do wish it wouldn’t perpetuate the myth that stage mentalism and “real” paranormal phenomena are the same, or even related. I have a long standing interest in both, but they are completely separate things.

Bonus fact: Uri Geller designed the logo for *N Sync. It must have taken all his psychic energy to conjure up a star to put in front of the band’s name. Oh hey! Maybe it’s related to the fact that most people out of any randomly selected group will choose a star over other symbols. Well played, Uri.

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Capital Idea


I was reading a charming little article at New Scientist, called “How Does it Feel to Die?”, and came across the following passage:

Despite the public boasting of several prominent executioners in late 19th-century Britain, a 1992 analysis of the remains of 34 prisoners found that in only about half of cases was the cause of death wholly or partly due to spinal trauma. Just one-fifth showed the classic “hangman’s fracture” between the second and third cervical vertebrae. The others died in part from asphyxiation.

Michael Spence, an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has found similar results in US victims. He concluded, however, that even if asphyxiation played a role, the trauma of the drop would have rapidly rendered all of them unconscious. “What the hangmen were looking for was quick cessation of activity,” he says. “And they knew enough about their craft to ensure that happened. The thing they feared most was decapitation.”

I’m so proud of my school. If it weren’t for this fine Western scholar, we’d all lie awake at night worrying about whether hanging victims were conscious while they were strangled to death.

Hanging ain’t so bad after all. Crime, here I come.

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Your Brain Will Betray You

People are dumb. If they hear something that is unclear or ambiguous, they will hear whatever they want to hear, or whatever they are told to hear. And I don’t mean they’ll interpret “nice shoes” as a genuine comment when it was meant sarcastically; I mean people will actually hear completely different words depending on what they are expecting to hear. Even you are not immune to this.

Try this. Listen to the song embedded below. It’s Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backwards. Listen particularly to the section that starts at about 4:40 on the little timer.

Unless you’ve been exposed to this before, you probably heard random backwards gibberish, with maybe a few things that sounded like real words.

Now listen to the clip below:

It’s the same song you heard before. The exact same noises reached your ears, but you probably heard completely different words than you did at the 4:40 mark in the previous clip. To prove it, go back and listen to it again if you’d like. After seeing the purported lyrics, I can’t listen to it with out hearing the Satanic message.

Of course, it’s probably not really a Satanic message. We just look for the words we were told to look for in almost-random noises, and our brains make us find them. You could probably do this with almost any song. For example:

And with this in mind, I present to you the most fucked up thing you will see all day:

Edit: More of the same here.

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Book Review: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson


I Am Legend is a difficult book to categorize. At first glance, it’s a vampire novel; an accurate characterization, because yeah, there are vampires in it. But the deeper meaning and metaphors behind them, the structure of the story, and the situation the main character finds himself in, make it feel more like a zombie story. But even then, the focus isn’t so much on the creatures, but on the main character and his inner struggles, making it more of a sappy drama. You could even argue convincingly that it’s science fiction.

Given these overlapping categories, and the fact that I Am Legend came out in 1954 and has influenced subsequent generations of horror fiction, it could easily feel stale and cliche reading it today. It doesn’t; I Am Legend still feels fresh and new, even to someone like me who has seen and read almost every piece of horror fiction released since I was born (and a lot from before that, too).

Part of its brilliance has to do with Matheson’s writing, which gets right into the main character’s head, and feels just detailed and realistic enough to relate to. There is also some ineffable eeriness to it. Certain mental images – like pudgy Ben Cortman standing outside, constantly yelling at Neville to come out – stick with me in a way that other authors’ don’t, for some reason. I Am Legend should be required reading for anyone even remotely interested in the horror genre.

A note about the upcoming movie of I Am Legend starring Will Smith: WTF? Judging from the trailer, the movie has almost nothing to do with the book. Will Smith can be an OK actor, but I really can’t picture him pulling off the depressed, alcoholic, sexually frustrated, elderly Robert Neville from the book. No, I picture the Will Smith version romping around destroyed New York with his dog buddy (who must have had a good agent, because his role in the movie seems significantly expanded from his book counterpart), sharing feel-good moments, screaming “Aw HELL naw!” whenever he sees a vampire, then punching them in the face and spouting hilarious lines like “welcome to Earth”. And that is really the opposite sort of character from the one in the book. I like a good end-of-the-world movie, and I’d probably be excited about this one if it didn’t have the title “I Am Legend.” It’d be better if it had only claimed to be loosely based on the novel, and had a title like…oh I dunno… “Fresh Prince of the Entire World.”

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Magnets: Beyond Holding Things to Fridges


Some random but fascinating tidbits that I’ve learned while writing my comps today:

  • There are over fifty known sensory systems that have been identified in living things. Why, then, is a “sixth sense” seen as a far-out impossibility?
  • The genome of bacteria that can sense magnetic fields is only about 4.3 megabytes. All the information needed to create this organism could easily fit in an email attachment. The human genome is about 750 Mb. Bigger than a bacteria, but still smaller than Windows XP.
  • Magnetic structures, similar to those that allow the bacteria above to detect magnetic fields, have been found in a 4 billion year old meteorite from Mars. This is half a billion years older than the earliest known life on Earth. It suggests that the ability to detect magnetic fields may have been one of the first sensory systems to evolve, and that the ability to do so may have been brought to Earth from Mars.

While I still want to get this part of my comprehensive exams over with, it’s actually turning out to be pretty cool. My paper involves the following kickass things: Ghosts, hallucinations, Jesus, pigeon navigation, The Virgin Mary, ESP, psychokinesis, turtle navigation, mental patients, God, airplane crashes, whale suicide, lobster navigation, and now, Martians.

References:

Kirschvink, J. L., Walker, M. M., & Diebel, C. E. (2001). Magnetite-based magnetoreception. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 11, 462-467.

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Rotten Apple


Is it just me, or are Apple’s new iPods sorta disappointing?

The Shuffle hasn’t changed. The Nano does video and has a new interface, but looks fat and ugly (best comment I’ve seen about it: “does it do the truffle shuffle?”). What’s now called the “Classic” has the new interface and looks pretty good, and got a storage increase, which is nice, but for me, not worth upgrading for.

What will be talked about most is the new iPod Touch. It is, almost literally, an iPhone without the phone. It has all the stuff that people have been asking for in the top-of-the-line iPod for years: A giant touch screen, a snazzy new interface, and most importantly, a wireless internet connection to connect to the iTunes store directly (and, I pray to Jobs, sync with a computer wirelessly). It even has some cool stuff nobody expected, like having a web browser and doing fun stuff while in a Starbucks location.

This is all awesome. If it stopped there, and we used logical assumptions to fill in the blanks, I’d currently be putting my old iPod and a few internal organs up on Ebay in order to pay whatever it could possibly cost to get my hands on one. Unfortunately, one of those logical assumptions turns out to be false. I’m talking about storage capacity. This is the most advanced, most expensive iPod ever. It looks like an iPhone, but its focus is on music and video. So you’d expect it to hold the most songs and videos, at least as much if not more than the Classic. But this assumption is wrong. The biggest Touch is only 16GB.

It looks like they took the “iPhone without the phone” part a bit too literally. Why would I want this new iPod, then, if it does less than the iPhone, but doesn’t do much more? This sentiment is enhanced by the fact that Apple has also announced that the Touch’s WiFi capabilities will be immediately available on the iPhone as well, and it has just dropped in price to only $100 more than the Touch.

I’d rather pay $100 more for the same device with a phone. But I’ll do neither, not only because the iPhone still isn’t available in Canada, but because 8GB, or even 16GB, isn’t enough space to hold even a medium-sized music collection. Mine is already bigger than the previous 80GB ceiling, so even if I could afford it, using the Touch or iPhone as my primary iPod just isn’t practical.

Why can’t Apple just make one device that does everything? Fix the stupid problems with the iPhone, add a 160GB drive to it, and nobody could resist it.

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Location Location Location

I started up Google Earth for the first time in a while today. The newest addition is the ability to see what space looks like from any location on Earth, which is pretty cool. So of course, the first place I go to is our new house. The space stuff was boss, but I made an even better discovery:

We’re two minutes away from a clown school! Why the hell am I going to boring old real school?

Also note that London’s representation on Google Earth still isn’t the greatest. It’s a blurry mess, and I didn’t have to censor my road because it’s not even labeled. Come on, I want 3D models of nearby buildings so that I never have to leave the house again.

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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling

I’ll keep this short, since anyone who’s into Harry Potter will have already read this book, or will read it soon.

Deathly Hallows is pretty much what you’d expect from the last Harry Potter book. Almost every character and location from the series shows up in one form or another, even if only for a few paragraphs, as if to see them one last time before saying goodbye. It’s not arbitrary, though, and each paragraph has its purpose in setting up the inevitable final confrontation. I wouldn’t call it a mind-blowing finale that puts every other book to shame (though it has its twists and moments of brilliance), nor would I say Rowling is a flawless writer, but she does do some things better than almost anyone else.

First, she makes characters you care about. Harry is likable and realistic, and Rowling’s unwavering insistence on telling everything from Harry’s perspective only enhances that. Other characters are full of personality, even if only given a few lines of dialogue. This ability to create fleshed out characters strengthens the emotional impact when any of them succeed – or fail (and there are plenty of failures here). Second, she creates a cohesive world. There is a complex web of family trees, historical events, and magical rules that loop back on themselves and get described from different perspectives, but somehow it all manages to fit together and avoid contradicting itself. Third, and most importantly, Rowling manages to weave these characters into this world, setting up a cascade of mysteries and questions that slowly fall into place as the plot plays out. It’s amazing that she can take all this information and form it into a flowing story both within each book and across the whole series. Harry Potter never has that “I’m making this shit up as I go along” feel to it (sorry, I love you Stephen King, but I’m looking at you here), and I almost believe Rowling when she says that the entire 7-book story popped into her head fully formed during a train ride.

One recommendation if you haven’t read Deathly Hallows yet: Read the previous books first, even if you’ve read them before. Or at least Half Blood Prince. Details from that book especially come into play in this one, and although it’s not impossible to follow what’s going on, it’ll be less of a mental workout if you have it fresh in your mind.

I have no doubt that the Harry Potter series will be right up there with Star Wars, the Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings as a classic, timeless accomplishment in fantasy. Soon, all the scary fan worship that goes along with it will kick in (e.g., Harry Potter conventions, obsession with mundane details, fan fiction, and dressing up as scantily clad characters of the opposite gender). Still, its popularity is well deserved.

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Book Review: Cell, by Stephen King (Plus a Rant About Braaaaiiiins)

Stephen King has done all the typical monsters: vampires, werewolves, aliens, robots, clowns. Until now, though, he hasn’t done zombies. Cell is Stephen King doing zombies. Nothing more, nothing less.

He does, of course, add some twists to the genre, which I won’t give away here. The twists are done in context though; it’s obvious that King has seen a lot of zombie movies, and any deviation from the traditional zombie is done intentionally. His nods to zombie movies are subtle but effective (e.g. waiting for a tidy explanation of how the zombie outbreak began is missing the point). One twist sorta makes the idea of zombies less scary (for those who have read it, I’m talking about their cyclical nature), but it does keep the story moving in a believable way. The plot unfolds rapidly, almost feeling like a movie screenplay in both its pace and its visual style of writing. The bottom line is that Cell is an enjoyable read and hard to put down; that’s the highest praise I can give a book like this.

[TANGENT] There is one thing I have to complain about. At one point, a character in Cell uses the “humans use only 10% of their brains” myth to explain something. Where the hell did this come from, and why do people continue to believe it? Does anyone really think nature (or hell, God, if you prefer) would create this freakish creature with a head containing a tiny functional brain surrounded by 9 times more useless brain-coloured goo? That makes no sense. Perhaps people really mean “humans only use 10% of their brain at one time”. Closer to the truth, maybe, but the negative connotation is misleading. It’s like saying “computers use only 10% of their programs” because you never have every program running at the same time. If we “used 100% of our brains” in this context, we’d be trying to do everything a human can possibly do at one time (probably ending up paralyzed, babbling incoherently, and going insane trying to deal with all memories from our lives simultaneously rushing into consciousness); or more likely, we’d have some kind of seizure and die instantly, not unlike the computer frying itself if you managed to run every program at once.

I think the main explanation for the perpetuation of this myth is that people want it to be true. They want it to mean that we are using only 10% of our potentials, and there’s so much room for us to improve. That 90% holds the solution to all of life’s problems; we can end war, discover the universe’s secrets, and figure out the opposite sex, if only we try hard enough and dip into that 90% potential. Perhaps, though, it’d be more fruitful to realize that we’re already running at 100% (if not more) of what our brains are meant for, and if such solutions to life’s problems exist, they are already within our reach.

Oh, and another reason we want this to be true? Because if a zombie attacks and eats a chunk of your brain, ch

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The Impending Robot Revolution


Below is a quote from Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near. To put it in context: The singularity is a time when humanity as we know it will suddenly change drastically, due to advances in technology. For example, our brains will be enhanced by nonbiological computers, and we’ll spend half our time in fully immersive virtual reality. Some of the major advances that will lead to this change are what Kurzweil refers to as “GNR”, which stands not for the name of a band with a perpetually delayed album, but for “genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.” Here is the quote:

“The most powerful impending revolution is “R”: human-level robots with their intelligence derived from our own but redesigned to far exceed human capabilities. R represents the most significant transformation, because intelligence is the most powerful “force” in the universe. Intelligence, if sufficiently advanced, is, well, smart enough to anticipate and overcome obstacles that stand in its path.”

Is it just me, or is that terrifying? This isn’t science fiction; Kurzweil actually believes this will happen in the not-to-distant future, and I’m inclined to agree with him. Yet it sounds like science fiction, and not happy utopian future science fiction, but The Matrix / Mad Max / Blade Runner / oops we destroyed the earth science fiction.

Sure, it could go either way. Maybe the obstacles standing in the path of these superhuman, superintelligent, and presumably supersized robots will be obstacles that overlap with humanity’s: global warming, crime, obesity, premature baldness. But what if their obstacles are us? We with our dull neuron-based brains and squishy bodies?

I’m sure Kurzweil has speculation on how we’ll prevent this from happening (I’m only halfway through the book). I just hope he doesn’t underestimate the human race’s ability to make extremely stupid decisions, or overlook the fact that when it comes to world-altering technology, it only takes a small group of sketchy people to get their hands on it to do great harm. Let’s hope we can overcome that stuff, though, because virtual reality would be kickass, and I do like my squishy body.