magic is about honesty
everything here is true
except for the bits I made up
Persi Diaconis is an ex-magician. He left the world of professional magic to become a professor of statistics at Stanford. But those influences are still reflected in his work as many of the simple tools used in the exploration of statistics — coins, cards, dice — are also favourite tools of the magician. So nothing specifically to do with magic, but if you wanted to know how fair your super-complicated D&D dice were.
Watch to the end to get the link to the hidden part 2!
The domain where I've had the the most — what you might call — formal academic training is mathematics. Having spent years tutoring students in math (which means, by implication you're spending time with students who are less adept than the average at math) I understand that there is a definite peculiarity in the way people approach problems in math. Ordinary thinking involves guessing an answer — taking a shot in the dark — then trying to justify the guess as quickly as possible so you can move on to new problems. This manifests with students prepping for multiple choice tests saying something like, "It's B, isn't it?". And if I nod yes, they're right and they get to go onto the next question. But, as happens more often, I don't nod and that guess hasn't brought them any closer to a solution to the problem.
Math involves stepping back and looking at the problem from many different angles. It seems extraordinarily counter-intuitive if your goal is simply to get the pencil mark in the bubble for B.
Professor Persi Diaconis, in addition to being a professor of statistics, is also a world renowned magician, so when his work pops up in my news feed, I perk up. This is a wonderful example of the application of mathematical thinking to a very mundane problem. I guess the typical reaction to be a transition from this guy's so weird to this guy's so freakin' smart.
One of my more useless talents is that I'm particularly good at Rock-Paper-Scissors. As a youngster I was put into a skiing school in the mountains of British Columbia and for a week, we spent most of our time on the chairlift playing the game. (We also invented several useless and mathematically inconsistent plays including but not limited to dynamite, water-well and possum... I know, I could have been put in a box and studied.)
It's nice to see some of the strategies I came up with reproduced by the scientific community.
This is fairly similar, but not identical to the way I play (I need to keep my actual system sub rosa in case I'm ever called on to defend my title as Almighty-supreme-Rock-Paper-Scissors champion on Madison avenue.)
There's a second, amusing follow up video here.