The Atheist Blogger

Last night, Derren Brown promised to show a subliminal film that would glue a lot of us to our seats; we would literally not be able to get up. A lot of people watched, and over 500,000 of us were “stuck”, myself included. My friends Florian and Laura were watching with me, but after the film ended they were able to stand up without any problems. I found myself suddenly incapable of doing so.

There were a lot of cries of “you’re joking!” and “stop messing us around”, which slowly but surely turned into gasps of shock and horror as they realised that I really couldn’t stand up. The best I could do was get a few cm of the chair by pushing up with my hands, but my legs simply refused to support me. It was a weird feeling, but as I watched the subliminal clip, I felt my legs getting heavier and heavier. By the end, I could hardly feel them at all, and as I tried to get up, they turned to jelly and all the energy went out of me.

My friend filmed the event laughing at my futile efforts to lift myself. If it’s not too embarrassing I’ll upload it to YouTube sometime this week for you to watch. Next week, Derren has promised to turn us into “psychic spies”, which will be very interesting. When Florian and I viewed the subliminal film again today, nothing happened to either of us, and I reckon the subliminal messages are shown through the entire episode instead of the small film that was meant to do the job. Derren is all about misdirection after all!

Update: Here is a picture of my friend (and fellow atheist) Robert Heywood (@rjheywood) stuck to his seat:

Witchcraft, suggestion, or laziness? You decide.

The main video event this week was dprjones‘ 24 hour blogtv charity drive in aid of Doctors without Borders. The target amount to raise was $10,000 and this was quickly surpassed during the show and reached a final total of $18,761.92. The combination of this total and the amount brought in by the eBay auctions reached over $32,000.  Congratulations to dprjones and all his co-hosts for putting on a great show and for raising so much for a great charity!

The first video I want to share is a new one from QualiaSoup, and fans of his videos will know that he always manages to convey complex ideas across in an easy to understand manner. His latest video on “Putting faith in its place” is no exception.

Some of you are probably still trying to figure out how Derren Brown actually managed to predict the lottery, so here is a video laced with helpful hints and annotations (go to the YouTube site to view the annotations).

Finally, I’m not sure how many people will be able to view this due to “copyright restrictions” but here is a clip from a TV show making fun of an American Christian superhero show called “Bibleman”. It really is quite bizarre, and if you want to see more, I suggest searching for “Bibleman” at YouTube; there are plenty of videos to watch!

Last Wednesday, Derren Brown amazed the nation by predicting the National Lottery. On Friday night, he promised to reveal how to do the trick, and this resulted in an hour long show that demonstrated some nice mental gymnastics, but no real answer. He started by stating that there were three (main) ways of predicting the National Lottery:

1. Faking a ticket.
2. Predicting the outcome of the machine.
3. Fixing the machine.

Option 1 wasn’t really an option for him, since it involved breaking the law and wasn’t really predicting anything. Option 2 was of more interest, and the rest of the show was devoted to this, explaining about various mathematical tricks you can do, and finally came to the “wisdom of crowds” technique.

Derren explained that a mathematician observed a “guess the weight of the ox” game at a country fair, and although nobody got the answer spot on, if you took the average of the answers given by the crowd, you got the exact weight. He said the same technique could be used to predict the lottery, and showed a film of 24 individuals studying the numbers of the last 100 lotteries, and trying to figure out what the next numbers would be. On the first attempt, they got 1 correct, on the second, when they did automatic writing and were allowed to write down negative numbers and numbers higher than 49 (the highest number in the lottery), they got 4 out of 6. Derren claimed that on the last go (a few minutes before his lottery prediction on Wednesday), they gave him the numbers that would eventually end up on the podium next to him; his prediction.

Of course, none of that makes any sense, and it doesn’t surprise me. Predicting the lottery is impossible if you are trying to guess some kind of pattern to the numbers. The reason why “wisdom of crowds” worked for the ox is because everyone could see the ox, and in guessing its weight you will have people who go too high and people who go too low, the average of all these values will be a good estimate for the weight. The same just doesn’t apply to random lottery balls; it doesn’t matter if a group of 24 people come up with “2″ as an answer, the machine will pick balls at random, and in a random machine every ball has an equal chance of coming out.

So how did he do it? People who want to believe his explanation will think that, the more rational will come up with other methods he could have used. The one that seems most likely is the theory that he simply used a split-screen and some very clever live video editing. The evidence that backs this theory up is the apparent sudden movement of one of the end balls in the stand (caused by the split-screen syncing back to a single-screen view), and the fact that Derren didn’t reveal his prediction before the actual draw. His reason for not doing this is that the BBC had a legal right to announce the result before anyone else, but the only problem with that logic is that he wasn’t announcing the result, he was announcing his prediction. Even in the “behind the scenes” footage that he aired with his show on Friday, you only see him select the balls out of the box, not the actual balls themselves.

As for option 3, in the true spirit of a showman, Derren took to the stage in the last 5 minutes of his Friday show, and told everyone how he *could* have done it by fixing the machines; simply make 12 sets of weighted balls, sneak into the high security area where the machines are used, and replace the regular balls with the weighted ones. His story was illustrated by blurred out pictures on the wall behind him, which gave everyone a laugh, and reminded everyone that this was Derren Brown; a man who does not reveal his secrets even if he says he will.

This Friday, Derren has promised to reveal a tape that will literally “glue us to our seats” in a show he has called “How to Control the Nation“. I’ll be sat with my laptop so I can tweet the event and see whether I get “stuck” as Derren says I will.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up at Radical Atheist, so go check it out! It’s a great carnival, and has two great reviews of the new book “The evolution of God” which were very informative.

Remember to submit something to the next carnival, or put your own blog forward for the prestigious job of hosting the carnival!

As a side note, I’ve been meaning to update this blog a lot more often, but every time I’ve sat down to write a post, something else has barged in the way, whether it be important emails I have to answer, work that has to be done, or (most recently) a breach of my PayPal account which almost cost me $300 I don’t have. Nevertheless, I’m finally emerging from the flow of “more-important-than-blogging” things, and there will be a few articles up this week on my adventures in Egypt, and my delving into Astrology!

Given that Twitter is a far better (and quicker) way of getting my thoughts out, if you miss me you can always follow my thoughts there. My account is @ah8r.

Here’s a fun meme I thought up late last night. For each letter of the alphabet, choose an atheist blog or atheist related website that begins with that letter and link to it. To make things easier, you can remove preceding articles such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ to unlock more letters. For instance, this website “The Atheist Blogger” could be used for both the letter ‘T’ and ‘A’. Converting numbers to their word forms is also acceptable.

If you can’t think of any sites, have a perusal of the Atheist Blogroll, and if you really can’t find a website with the starting letter (gold star goes to anyone finding a website starting with X), choose an interesting word from the dictionary and list it with its definition. Try to be imaginative! Remember, this is a great chance to discover blogs you may have not heard of before, so don’t feel that you have to put blogs in the meme that you read regularly!

Finally, link back to the blog who sent you this meme, and tag 5 other blogs.

1. About Agnosticism / Atheism
2. Bay of Fundie
3. CyberLizard’s Collection
4. Deep Thoughts
5. ExChristian.net
6. Friendly Atheist
7. God is Pretend
8. Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes
9. The Invisible Pink Unicorn
10. Jewish Atheist
11. Kill The Afterlife
12. Life Without Faith
13. Moiz Khan
14. nullifidian
15. Oz Atheist’s Weblog
16. Pharyngula
17. Quiet Atheist
18. Radical Atheist
19. Sean the Blogonaut
20. toomanytribbles
21. Unreasonable Faith
22. The View from the Pond
23. Why Don’t You Blog?
24. xylomancy – divination by means of pieces of burning wood (lol)
25. You Made Me Say It!
26. ZackFord Blogs

For tagging, I choose: Friendly Atheist, Unreasonable Faith, CyberLizard’s Collection, and before you think I’m just spelling out naughty words, Life Without Faith & Sean the Blogonaut