Chris Worfolk's Blog

Saturday saw the September meetup of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub which this month saw a talk delivered by yours truely on Derren Brown’s recent “How to win the lottery.” It was a fairly short talk to be honest, “basically, the guy is just psychic” pretty much concluded everything I had to say in one sentence.

From here on we explored the various tricks and trimmings presented to us by Derren who may not actually be able to predict the lottery but certainly puts on a good show.

After years, upon years, we’ve finally got Si drinking! I can’t help but feel this would be a highly appropriate time to revive Sarann’s Bad Influence Diary but the possibilities running through my head as to where to go from here and just keeping me too busy at the moment 😉 .

We also got Jewish Dan to put in a long awaited appearance. Good times.

Friday saw international freshers’ fair, a special societies fair put on for international students before the hordes of regular students arrive. While there weren’t a great deal of students there and we still had a lot of prep work to do it never the less served as quite a good practice run for next week.

Day two was Tueday and I was still feeling crap but decided to push ahead with my plan of trying to drink through it. After all, with it being an A-Soc social night it’s pretty much my job. I wasn’t even taking it easy and with it being the last day of the wine festival, when Graham tried to order a glass of wine he came away with the bottle.

On the negative side it didn’t make me much better. But the on plus side it didn’t make me any worse – I work up Wednesday morning feeling rough but with no signs of a hangover so I once again seem to have managed to stop drinking at the appropriate time and get enough water in me.

Wednesday night I finally gave up – relucantly cancelled on York Brights and headed to bed which I was in before 6pm.

I was feeling ill on Monday but with work to be done I headed round to Rich’s flat with George to get editing away on Something Good ’09.

I had already spent three hours the day before on pre-editing and Rich had spent the morning doing some too so luckily we were able to dive straight in and get things done. Even with this big head start it was still 1am by the time we were finished as well as being several bottles of wine later.

The result, however, was well worth it.

Memories.

This was actually from a couple of weeks ago. I took the photos on my iPhone and uploaded them using the WordPress app. Seems to work reasonably well.

Here’s me busting a groove earlier today.

I spent the day on set filming an Atheist Society parody of Utah Saints’ Something Good ’08, a little idea I had had for an intro video for the society this year.

It was actually a really quick shoot – we didn’t kick off until 4pm and we were finished by about 8pm. Of course this is where the real world begins – since getting home I’ve spent nearly three hours doing the pre-editing for the camera I have – we still have all the editing to do on top of that and that is just one of three cameras we were using!

Never the less the film is now in the can so with a little bit of magic editing and after effects we should have something pretty good.

I’ve just watched through Derren Brown’s “how to win the lottery” in which Derren (supposedly) correctly predicted the lottery numbers for last Wednesday’s national lottery draw. Last night he offered to explain how he did it. Of course in reality, he still leaves you wondering.

His explanation was that it used the “wisdom of crowds” which suggests that subconsciously a group of people can make more accurate predictions than one person alone, and in his example he took 24 people, had them study the lottery numbers for the past year and try and work out which ones came next. He then averaged them out and claimed to have successfully predicted the numbers.

That or, as a final end to the show briefly discusses how we could have fixed the lottery to make sure that the right numbers came up. Of course he claimed this theory was both illegal and ridiculous and this is for the most part true – I think we can rule out that Derren and his team actually managed to get through security and fix the draw.

So how did he manage it? Derren begins his show on Friday by listing the three possibilities by which he could have done it. Faked a lottery ticket, genuinely predicted the numbers or fixed the draw.

However this is where it begins to break down. Where have we seen such an example before? The answer of course is “bad, mad or god.” The classic Christian proposition that Jesus was either evil, crazy or he actually was the son of god. Immediately ruling out the idea that he could have been mistaken, never claimed to be god or never existed at all, to name just a few of other possibilites.

Derren begins by ruling out his first suggestion and leaving us with just two possibilities – either he correctly predicted the numbers or he fixed the draw. He then dismisses the second idea and offers us a very dubiously scientific but almost believable senario and invites us to “believe, or not.”

In reality of course, the first lines Derren spoke on the show were the most accurate. “This show uses magic, trickery and misdirection” he proclaims boldly and yet we still do not appreciate on what scale it is – that the entire one hour show is a misdirection leading us down the garden path to draw attention away from the fact that there is was something a little dodgy about the stand the predictions were held on – which couldn’t be revealed in advance for legal reasons.

We rack our brains trying to work out whether his theory of crowds could actually work and so much thought do we put into this that it never occurs to us that the 24 people predicting the numbers are probably in on the trick – or that Derren ignored the numbers they predicted and only “revealed” to them the numbers they had predicted when the lottery draw had been made.

Not that this takes away the magic of it. Derren put on a superb performance and one which I would highly recommend watching. Just remember that you’re still watching a magic show.

Or at least, that is my take on it. You can believe, or not.

By Wednesday evening Lil had been up for over 24 hours having worked nights on Tuesdays and then fueled herself up on Relentless. Or crack, it’s hard to tell the difference when someone the size of Lil drinks an entire can of Relentless. As we haven’t seen the can, or the crack, whichever one it actually was, I guess we’ll never know.

So the obvious thing to do in this situation was to head over to Nicola’s 09/09/09 party celebrating the fact it was the 9th of September 2009 – an idea she had only made up the night before while drunk at the A-Soc social and had just invited “very special friends” to despite the fact that there were over 70 people on the Facebook guest list.

Last night saw the usual weekly A-Soc summer social at the Cuthbert Brodrick for much steak and drinking. As ever a good time was bad by all, except Rich, who we managed to drive crazy with talk about the logo. On the plus side however, Kate and Steven are now “official” according to Rich.

Interestingly Sophie couldn’t make it and Paul cancelled on us at the last minute leading us to the conclusion that Paul is actually in control of, and indeed has been in control of, the society all along through his puppets, myself, Norm and now Sophie. We always suspected, but never guessed…