I have a favorite card trick that I do often because it takes no crazy card skill, just a little bit of memorization. It works through some interesting mind tricks, and I tried to figure out what makes it work, because I never learned what makes it work myself. Today, I'll go through how I figured it out. First, we'll go through the details of the trick itself. The card trick is intended for three people, but you could easily do it with just one person if you wanted to. It's a bit more impressive with three people, though. First, have your pals pick three cards. Make a pile of 10 cards, two piles of 15 cards, and keep 9 cards in your hand. Your first pal puts their card on top of the first pile, which has 10 cards. In practice, of course, their card will be face down. It's face up here to make it easier to see what's happening. Your first pal can pick as many cards as they want from the second pile (which has 15 cards) and put them on top of their card, which they just put on top of the first pile. The only restriction is that they can't take all of them. Now, your second pal puts their card on the second pile. Your second pal then takes as many cards as they want from the third pile, and places them on top of their card. Now your third pal places their card on the third pile, and you place the 9 cards that were in your hand on top of their card. Then, you put the third pile on top of the second, and that pile on top of the first. An important note is that from this new deck, make sure to take four cards from the top and place them on the bottom! Now, you start to flip cards from the deck in this order: the first one is flipped face up, the second is flipped face down, the third is flipped face up, etc. In this picture, I have done it until we reach the first card, but you would of course continue without stopping, because their cards would all be face down! Everytime you run out of cards, you pick up the pile that was made from the face-down cards, and repeat the process. When you are down to three cards, those three will be the cards your friends picked! Pretty cool stuff. But what makes it work? It sure wasn't obvious to me at first why it should always work. Because your friends can take as many cards from the other piles to place on top of their card, I at first thought that the positions of the cards changed each time. This turned out to not be true. It turns out that, when you're at the step where you would start to flip cards face up, the cards your friends picked are always in positions 6, 22, and 38 when counting from the top down. It took me some time to convince myself that this was always true; you should take some time to figure it out too! Why are these numbers significant? Well, by separating the cards into piles four times, we are essentially dividing by 2, four times. That is the same as dividing by 2^4, or 16. When we divide each of the numbers that give the positions of the cards (6, 22, and 38) by 16, and round up, we get the numbers 1, 2, and 3. These are the positions of the cards after the four divisions, which is exactly what we want. Of course, there are other numbers that satisfy this, but these numbers are the only ones that work in practice. This just gives some insight into the process. I had to apply some creative solutions when I ran into the initial roadblock of why the heck the cards were in the same position each time. I ran through the trick several times, and then I realized that giving your buddies the option of choosing how many cards they want to go on top of theirs only gives them the illusion of changing anything. It actually does nothing to affect the position of the cards, which of course had to be the case. Figuring out why is pretty funny, actually. The creative solutions I employed were simply; do the trick multiple times, and pay attention! These are definitely the simplest solutions, but they work wonders.
0 Comments
I have all these old notebooks with important information, but they're old and beat up. I want to try and find a good way to make them more usable. There was a lot of spare paper, so taking that out for later use is a good first step. After removing the papers that didn't have stuff I might need later on, I wasn't left with that much. Now there is much less going on in this notebook. It doesn't feel so intimidating to try and search through it for stuff I need anymore. I removed a lot of the dividers that weren't necessary. I want to get rid of the remaining paper bits, but I don't have a pair of scissors. I'm not sure how I should get rid of all this. So, I ended up with a much smaller and less messy notebook. I feel way better about coming back to use it now that it doesn't have so much junk in it. This turned out to be more time-intensive that I anticipated. It also turned out to need more physical strength than I expected. I didn't know exactly how it would turn out when I started, but it ended up in a useful state. I did get stuck on how to take out the little paper bits without scissors. I guess I'm more practical than I give myself credit for.
Back in my freshman year, I took a class called Internet Memes and Digital Media. It as a combination of MGMT 219 and Econ 105. It was very silly. Out final project was to make a video about economics with the goal of it getting super popular. Naturally, that did not happen, but it was still a creative challenge! I'm probably most proud of the introduction. We wanted words to magically appear on the screen, but we didn't have the video editing skill to make it happen. So we wrote words on the board, filmed ourselves erasing them, and then played it backwards to get the effect we wanted. Just pure genius. This whole thing took about a week. We faced many challenges, like a lack of editing skill, and a lack of motivation. Certainly the most influential factor was the time constraint. We got stuck all over the place, from trying to make funny jokes, to trying to get someone to act it out. We managed to succeed mostly from throwing something together at the last minute. However, I think we definitely made something to be a little proud of.
I work at CAPS, and I recently had to send my weekly email about what's going on, and what other tutors should watch out for. I immediately ran into some problems. At this point, I am already sensing the difficulties. When I say "your weeks", what do I mean? Do I mean that I hope that all the weeks you are going through are going well? I suppose I do hope that, but it's not what I wanted to convey. I wanted it to be about this past week. This might be a little closer, but then I get into the territory of whether or not "y'all's" is an acceptable word to use in a professional setting. Also, there are way too many apostrophes. This is closer to what I want, but it also feels like it implies that I am talking to a single person. I'm talking to all the math tutors, so I don't want that. At this point, I've spent 20 minutes on this email, when it should have taken 5. Now I have finally accepted my poor grasp of the English language. I consult the person in charge of the writing and language team at CAPS (this is a plug, but not a shameless plug, more like a shameful plug), and they inform me that "your week" is correct. "Your" in this case is singular, but it refers to "everyone", with which the email begins. Problem solved! There was some creativity involved throughout this process. I had to use words in ways I don't usually use them. In the end, the most creative solution was to use the dictionary, and the help of the resources I work around.
|
AuthorPatrick Denne Archives
April 2018
Categories |