[deleted]
An Odd Card Trick
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#12Just performed this trick for my partner and she was very underwhelmed. There’s probably a good delivery to figure out.
TFA explains the trick somewhat oddly, to make the math angle more obvious. Here's a (random) video of someone doing it a more usual presentation of the effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xau8Ng4aQ6Y Not the world's greatest magic trick or anything, but I don't think it's as transparently obvious to figure out as several commenters are suggesting.
Linking to a 9 year old YouTube video with 36 views and 12 subscribers should have an amusing impact on their metrics.
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#13The site has more tricks up its sleeve. Right-clicking on mathematical equations brings up a MathJax context menu!
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#14Just performed this trick for my partner and she was very underwhelmed. There’s probably a good delivery to figure out.
Yes - it boils down to “there are 10 cards. Pick some number of cards, give me the rest, and I’ll tell you how many you picked”. The addition of “more cards” very thinly disguises the basic fact that you are subtracting a number from 10. It’s not obvious to me how this could be done in a way that seems impressive.
> Yes - it boils down to “there are 10 cards. Pick some number of cards, give me the rest, and I’ll tell you how many you picked”.
It boils down to that when you know the trick, but it isn't trivial to conclude that from just seeing the trick being performed.
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#15The site has more tricks up its sleeve. Right-clicking on mathematical equations brings up a MathJax context menu!
MathJax creates this right-click context menu by default, see https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/options/menu.html
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#16Just performed this trick for my partner and she was very underwhelmed. There’s probably a good delivery to figure out.
Having dabbled in magic some, I can confirm that the delivery is far more important than I originally thought. Several times I have had my mind absolutely blown by a card trick, then found out it's a trick I have done myself! But they had put in so much more effort on honing the delivery, presentation, and patter to the point it became a different trick.
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#17Just performed this trick for my partner and she was very underwhelmed. There’s probably a good delivery to figure out.
Work it with a mentalist angle.
Separate the cards into a face up and face down, shuffle, deal out two piles while explaining that you can read their mind. That you can pull numbers right out of their head.
Have them pick a pile. Slide it over to them and slide one under the table while telling them so you can't see what you're doing. But really it's because they can't see what you're doing.
Tell them to go through their pile and count the number of face up and face down cards. But don't tell you. Emphasize that they shouldn't tell you the numbers. Once they have the counts, stare at them, make some jokes about what they're thinking. Then shuffle the cards around under the table a bit. Make it look like you're thinking about what you're doing, mutter, "yes, yes, no, up, down" etc.
Then after a few seconds, say you got it and do the reveal.
Bonus, if they flipped their deck before counting and therefore the counts are backwards, you can go "ta-da" and flip your deck in front of their face, working the misfire as a false reveal.
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
TFA explains the trick somewhat oddly, to make the math angle more obvious. Here's a (random) video of someone doing it a more usual presentation of the effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xau8Ng4aQ6Y Not the world's greatest magic trick or anything, but I don't think it's as transparently obvious to figure out as several commenters are suggesting.
Linking to a 9 year old YouTube video with 36 views and 12 subscribers should have an amusing impact on their metrics.
I was going to skip the video, but after knowing the metrics I needed to add to the level of bewilderment.
The video has been up for ~80k hours. It just got 80% of its views in the last hour.
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#19The wine and water explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Wine and water have different molar masses and combining a liter of water and a liter of wine doesn’t give exactly two liters of the new substance, in the same way as a liter of ping pong balls and a liter of sand doesn’t produce two liters of ping pong sand when mixed together - some of the molecules are bigger than some of the others.
Once you pour a liter of the new, mixed, wine-water substance back into the first container, you’ll likely have less than a liter in the second container, so the wine bottle will contain more than the container originally containing water. Right?
Re: An Odd Card Trick
#20The wine and water explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Wine and water have different molar masses and combining a liter of water and a liter of wine doesn’t give exactly two liters of the new substance, in the same way as a liter of ping pong balls and a liter of sand doesn’t produce two liters of ping pong sand when mixed together - some of the molecules are bigger than some of the others. Once you pour a liter of…
I think you made the same mistake that I made when I first read it. The question isn't "what contains more wine?" but "compare the amount of water in A to the amount of wine in B."
Step 1: A with 10 L wine; B with 10 L water
Step 2: A with 9 L wine; B with 11 L liquid (10 L water and 1 L wine => 10/11 water, 1/11 wine)
Step 3: A with 10/11 * 1/11 = 10/11^2 L water; B with 1/11 * 10/11 = 10/11^2 L wine.
10 / 11*2 water in A ~ 10 / 11^2 wine in B.