Oliver O’Connell
Greg Cochran says he’ll be writing up a long
West Hunter blog post on how to think about the possibilities of highly different levels of technology.
I will mention that he pointed out the long history of how pilot sightings of “sprites,” bright colored upper-atmospheric lightning or Transient Luminous Events far above the clouds of conventional lightning storms, weren’t taken seriously for over 60 years until they were finally captured on video by the Space Shuttle in 1989.
Scottish Nobel laureate C.T.R. Wilson explained how they’d work in the 1920s and they were sighted frequently by pilots during WWII. But because they were so fast that they were easier to see with the eye than record with a film or video camera, pilot reports of the existence of sprites weren’t taken seriously by the scientific establishment for over 60 years even though a Nobelist had correctly predicted their existence in the 1920s. Pilots eventually tired of mentioning what
The World’s Greatest Card Trick Can’t Be Taught
May 25, 2021
World-renowned magician David Berglas, now 94 years old, does a card trick that’s so effortlessly simple and dazzling that no one has figured it out and Berglas himself says it cannot be taught.
The trick is a version of a classic plot of magic, called Any Card at Any Number. These tricks are called ACAAN in the business.
ACAAN has been around since the 1700s, and every iteration unfolds in roughly the same way: A spectator is asked to name any card in a deck let’s say the nine of clubs. Another is asked to name any number between one and 52 let’s say 31.