As such, one of my favorite tricks is proving probabilities irrelevant with a simple coin toss. Calling the outcome of a flipped coin with greater accuracy than baseline probability impresses analytical folks, as they assume nothing, other than some science fiction super computer, can accurately guess the answer 90-100% of the time.

While probability is a small part of the method, it only applies when I think I am wrong (discussed later). Ultimately, the secret originates from a biological process and a physical law.

I rarely demonstrate my coin toss principle for mentalists and magicians, but when I have, they ask me what sort of “device” I use to know if the coin is heads or tails. They assume I must have a way to peek under their hand after the coin lands. While cool, such a setup is unnecessary.

So how did little ‘ole Aaron stumble upon this superhuman ability to call a coin toss with such precision accuracy? It all started when I was a kid, laying on my back watching the ceiling fan go round on a hot summer’s day.

I discovered – as most kids do – you can visually slow down the fan by focusing on a single blade and spinning your eyes in the same direction the fan is turning. It works with ceiling fans, box fans, record players, spinning tires, etc.

The reason humans can slow down the rotating action of a spinning object is two-fold; 1) as your eyes follow the object, the eye muscles move in a jerking motion, causing your vision to flicker, 2) your eye movement, prospectively speaking, is moving at a faster speed relative to the rotating object.

You probably recognize Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in the second example, but the first principle above is the Stroboscopic Effect, named after Harold Eugene Edgerton’s 1931 stroboscope invention. He employed a flashing lamp to study machines in motion. Edgerton later used his bursts of flashing light to create still photographs of propelled objects, such as bullets.

According to Wikipedia, “The rotational speed is adjusted so that it becomes synchronized with the movement of the observed system, which seems to slow and stop. The illusion is caused by temporal aliasing.”

A strobe light flashing at the proper period can appear to freeze or reverse cyclical motion (focus on one part of the image to see the effect better).

Apply the Stroboscopic Effect to a coin toss, combined with Relativity, and you can call the results with consistent accuracy – especially when your spectator isn’t good at flipping coins (some people have it, other’s don’t). By simply watching the coin in motion, using your eyes’ features and limitations, you will see on which side the coin lands.

You can make it easier on yourself by standing at your spectator’s side, with the light source over your right shoulder. Also, the bigger the coin the better, and if you can use an older [U.S.] coin wherein the heads and tails are in contrast with one another, you will find it is easier than the new state quarters (the two sides are nearly indistinguishable even at rest on some of them). Put an “X” on one side until you get the hang of it.

With some practice, you can beat the odds every time!

You may remember, at the beginning of this article I mentioned sometimes having to rely on probabilities. Occasionally, you just can’t see how the coin landed, or parts of the toss were unclear and you lost your place. In those instances, you just have to guess without any visual certainty.

The secret of guessing, especially in a situation with two possible answers, is to decide which answer you think is correct, and then change your mind. By changing your mind, your probable chances of accuracy increases (do the math, it is true!).

Another way to guess with probable accuracy is to consider how many heads versus tails have resulted up until this toss, then choose the dominant answer, and if it matches your best possible guess, don’t change your mind. If doesn’t match, do change your mind.

Either way, even if Stroboscopic Effect and the Theory of Relatively abandon you mid-demonstration, you still have probabilities [and my math friends] on your side!

During my adventure, I found a spider menacing around on a wooden bench. He was an interesting looking spider, so I set my hand down in his path and he crawled onto my palm.

After making friends – as best you can with a spider – I set my hand back down for him to scurry away to his bench-front home. Apparently, we were better friends than I thought. Instead of leaving my hand, he ran up my arm.

When he reached my shoulder, I tried fruitlessly to get him back on my hand. In a last-ditch effort to avoid a spider kiss on my cheek (or in my ear), I blew a tiny gust of air in his direction, propelling him off towards the bench.

As spiders do, he dispersed a constant line of silk, starting from my shoulder and spanning all the way down to the bench.

My MRGADFLY sense kicked in and I started thinking – I started wondering:

Is the production of a long strand of silk a predictable response from this organism when dropped?

Could a person take a spider, construct a series of variables enticing the spider to produce a starting point of silk, and then safely fling him in a desired direction to an endpoint, leaving behind a useable length of genuine spider silk?

Since the silk is sticky when first produced, are multiple strands of their web, in an ideal environment, combinable into one super-strong, yet still invisible strand?

In my little brain, the idea had merit. And since I create and sell magic tricks for a living, I researched spiders and developed a method to reproduce the amusement park event in a controlled environment, hoping it would lead to a marketable product.

WARNING: All spiders are venomous (except two arachnid families) and unless you are a trained professional, you should stay away from them. I am simply providing my methodology here for your entertainment.

The first thing I did was a quick web search to find out which spiders have the strongest silk. Thanks to Google, I quickly learned an Orb Web Spider, known as the Darwin Bark Spider (Caerostris Darwini), produces the strongest spider silk discovered so far.

According to Agnarsson, Kuntner, and Blackledge’s “Bioprospecting Finds the Toughest Biological Material: Extraordinary Silk from a Giant Riverine Orb Spider” (2010), the Darwin Bark Spider’s silk is “The toughness of forcibly silked fibers averages 350 MJ/m3, with some samples reaching 520 MJ/m3. Thus, C. darwini silk is more than twice as tough as any previously described silk, and over 10 times tougher than Kevlar”

To put those “toughness” numbers in prospective, the Darwin Bark Spider’s silk is the most tensile discovered substance on earth. You can stop a jet mid-flight with a strand the thickness of a pencil.

“They [C. darwini] build their web with the orb suspended directly above a river or the water body of a lake, a habitat that no other spider can use,” says Ingi Agnarsson, director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Puerto Rico.

This unique position allows the Darwin Bark Spider to collect prey flying over the surface of the water. Scientists have observed more than 32 mayflies on their web at a time, with draglines that extend to both sides of the river.

“There are over 40,000 species of spiders,” says Agnarsson, “more than 99.99 percent of spider silks are as yet unexplored. It would not be unexpected to find novel characteristics among all those unexplored spider silks.”

The problem is, I couldn’t find (or obtain through mailorder), a Darwin Bark Spider, nor the second strongest silk producer, the Golden Orb Spider (well, I did play with a version, the N. clavipes, but without results).

Then I realized, in my experiments, I could combine the webs, so strength isn’t really a factor if I can collect a large amount of the silk strands quickly. Thus, I concentrated my efforts on a local species of spider known for producing big webs – the Neoscona Arabesca – also in the Orb Web family – with an ideal thickness (read invisibility) for my project.

Once I decided which spider to use, I needed to learn about the webs themselves. Spiders produce seven different types of silk. Which is strongest? Which is longest? Which results from reproducible stimuli?

The silk a spider uses for “Guide Lines,” the strands laid as the spider ventures from home to find their way back, is very much different from “Capture lines” and “Pheromone Trails.” But I liked how the spider at the amusement park created that long strand when it “flew” down to the bench – those are called “Drop Lines” or “Anchor Lines.” You know, Spider-Man web slinging.

To extract the silk, I needed a “contraption.” I often find myself in need of strange contraptions and this was one of the strangest.

Due to its ability to conduct static electricity, I used cellulose acetate to produce long five-foot tubes with a circumference large enough to house my spiders (comfortable,yet cozy). Around the tops of both ends, I coated the inside of the tube with a rough surface produced by liquid acetate. I punched tiny holes in the rough surface to attract the spider, using its oxygen and water source as bait.

I capped each end, but the two caps were different from one another while still interchangeable to either end. One cap was flat, simply used as a cover. The other cap had an air bladder attached, to simulate my blowing the spider off my shoulder (gently).

When I placed the spider in the tube and stood the tube on end, the spider slowly worked his way to the top. When I squeezed the air bladder, it shot the spider to the other end. As predicted, the spider laid a silk drop line from the top of the tube to the bottom. Later in the day, the spider slowly crawled back up to the top, and again, I squeezed the air bladder, producing another five-foot strand of silk.

Before long, I put an air bladder at both ends, and simply shot the poor little creature from one end of the tube to the other with air. In two days, with a lot of patience, I collected more than a dozen strands of silk in the tube.

Occasionally, the spider learned to dislike the ends and rested in the middle of the tube. I altered the tubes to come apart in the center, one overlapping the other, providing an area to work with the spider without damaging the silk.

Using an automated system, incorporating multiple tubes and several spiders, one could probably generate thousands of strands of silk per week – appealing to magicians and researchers alike.

After a day or two of production, I removed the spider and let him go free (actually, I used female spiders almost exclusively), and found another spider for “silking.” Since I couldn’t feed or water the spider in the tube, I collected them in the mornings after they had adequately fed the night before, and lightly wet the air holes around the ends with a damp sponge.

Once I had all the strands I wanted, I took off both caps, and ran my finger around the inside of the top of the tube. As I extracted the silk, a small build up of static electricity acted as a lubricant and allowed for easy removal of the silk from the tube.

The first time I successfully obtained a useable finished product, I was giddy as a schoolgirl. I quickly levitated a few small objects: a leaf, a paperclip, and four playing cards Bulldog Clipped together. My first strands, slightly more invisible than dulled Nylon Invisible Thread, held 57 grams of weight vertically, and 46 grams horizontally.

With an acetate ring, I was able to produce spider silk “rubber bands,” with elasticity similar to which magicians are used to working and invisibility to match.

It was a fun experiment and there is commercial value for anyone wanting to get into both the spider and the magic business, but it really wasn’t for me. I am not in favor of imprisoning any creature, let alone one that has venomous fangs!

Okay. I have to admit. Ever since Ray Kurzweil introduced the idea of nanobots coursing through our veins constantly rejuvenating cellular structure, I have thought one thing: that would make a great magic trick!

Over the years, I developed a couple of demonstrations (a basic example is at the bottom of this article). However, what stimulates my little brain even more, is the concept of biological and mechanical competition.

Your iPhone is a good friend today, but what if you had to augment your own DNA to compete with a world of artificially intelligent smart phones?

Scientists, with strings of letters before and after their name, refer to the apex moment of biological/technological competition as the “singularity.” Many predict singularity will occur in 2025 – around the time software and hardware progress to such a degree, they outpace the human brain.

Large, clunky computers might seem manageable today, but what about in the future when every person owns millions of microscopic computers?

Technology is expanding exponentially. Neural implants, for instance, according to Ray Kurzweil’s models, reduce in size at “a rate of 100 [times] per decade, so these technologies will be 100,000 times smaller in 25 years, and 25 years from now they will be the size of a blood cell.”

Of course, we are not there yet. Even the most powerful super computers can only process 10 to the power of 12 bits per second. Overkill for surfing Facebook, but the human brain is still millions of times faster. Even quantum computers, which will someday rival the imagination of science fiction writers, have only just broken the 3×5=15 threshold.

Computers don’t have to be smart to steal jobs from humans. We compete now as robots build cars, answer phones, and stock shelves. Imagine when competition becomes creative: when the funniest comedian on earth is a computer (you can see MIT’s recent research for an example), the best business idea generator is a desktop calculator, and the chef in every restaurant has a model number.

Humans evolve at a much slower rate than technology, so to remain competitive we will have to integrate with machines.

Our core body parts, those required for human life, will be easily replaceable. Power supplies, often the major limiter in the smallest-possible size of a device, will be biological, relying on cell reproduction for endless energy. Medical breakthroughs will occur as a matter of routine function, with computers breeding discoveries from deductive reasoning, and their human masters incorporating the results in a slippery slope of curiosity.

The result: humans will live longer lives.

“Through the Wormhole,” staring Morgan Freeman (Science Channel, check local listings for show times), recently discussed the concept of eternal life through inevitable scientific innovation.

“In just the past 200 years, the average lifespan has double from about forty, to almost eighty years,” Freeman said. “Breakthroughs in biology and physics could soon bring immortality within our grasp. For better or worse, many of you watching me right now, may live to see the day when aging, and death itself, are relics of the distant past.”

If life expectancy continues to double every couple hundred years, we are on our way to living to 400 years by 2411. Do the math – that is 386 years after the singularity – 386 years of aggressive biological/technological competition.

SIDEBAR: The average divorce rate in the U.S. today is over 41%, with the average human living 80 years. Think of the divorce rate when humans live to be 300! Not to mention the candles on their birthday cake!

Jump ahead 10,000 years in the future. Human life will be very much different than it is today. In contrast, imagine the human species 10,000 years ago. We were knee-deep in the Stone Age. 10,000 years from now, our current technology will look as primitive to the humans of the future, as a stone hammer looks to us.

In that futuristic time, the human lifespan, barring any legislative mandate of automatic death by a certain age, is potentially infinite. One need only understand why humans die in the first place, to see longevity is really quite basic.

WHY DO HUMANS DIE?

Technically, we don’t just kick the bucket. We decay slowly due to old age and disease or we decay quickly due to trauma.

This decay is entropy; the second law of thermodynamics. Roughly speaking, entropy is “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work.”

Every cell in our body decays at some rate, but Mitochondrial DNA requires special focus. Mitochondrial DNA is found in organelles known as the mitochondria; structures located within eukaryotic cells. These DNA strands convert energy from food into a form of energy the cell uses to function. They are “cellular engines.”

“If you can imagine in the cells, you have hundreds of these mitochondria. These little engines,” says Valter Longo, a geneticist at the University of Southern California, “and these hundreds of engines provide the energy locally to every single cell in our body.”

When these mitochondrial powerhouses wear down, our bodies begin to decay and age.

In a recently conducted experiment with baker’s yeast, Valter found a way to reverse the decay, and rejuvenate mitochondria in cells. By simply removing two genes, RAS2 and SCH9, he prolonged the yeast’s lifespan from hours to weeks – the equivalent of a human
living 800 years!

The yeast didn’t just live longer, it also developed resistance to fatally noxious stimuli. Heat that would usually kill the yeast simply
caused its DNA to regenerate more quickly.

Inspired by his success, Valter started experimenting with mice, already doubling their life expectancy using the same method of gene removal.

We know humans have over sixty genes attributed to age decay, discovered by comparing young and old genomes. Removing all of them may not be feasible, so we must assume that, even if humans live thousands of years, some decay may be necessary for desired features to remain (memory versus wrinkles).

Instead of removing the age-attributed genes, we might constantly restore them to new(er) condition using microscopic clean-up crews. Scientists have genetically spliced photophobic algae and the corrosion-eating bacteria from the human digestive track. These programmable biological robots may someday be rubbed on the skin, and as they eat through the body making their way to the colon, digest cell waste, leaving behind healthy [young] Mitochondrial DNA.

In Freeman’s “Through the Wormhole,” they prophesize a day when humans are digitally stored on computers, rendering these medical advances unnecessary. The concept might be common practice in the future, but for right now, it is significantly new technology. And thus, still in the realm of magic.

THE MAGIC TRICK: NANOPAPER

“Our skin is not so different form a piece of paper. Skin is about the same thickness as paper, both are made of a collection of cells, and when not connected to our body, flesh tears just as easy.”

Tear a small piece of paper into even smaller pieces. Roll the pieces into a ball (Billet Switch) and hand it to the spectator. When the spectator opens the ball, the piece of paper is fully restored.

“Skin heals in much the same way. Given enough time it will grow back together, leaving scars like the paper left wrinkles. They say, someday, we will be able to inject tiny little bugs into our bodies that will rejuvenate our cells.”

Pretend to lay the wrinkled piece of paper on your palm-up hand, but secretly switch the worn piece of paper for a pristine, unwrinkled piece of paper of the same size (have it rolled up in a th***ti* for the switch). Shake your hand back and forth – a shiver – fast at first to blur the paper, and then slow it down to reveal the absent wrinkles.

“And just like that, the wrinkles disappear and the paper is young again.”

Take Issue: In much the same way mentalists condemn those who claim “special powers,” especially when “channeling the dead,” I think it is an injustice to claim any magic trick is an actual demonstration of a scientific principle, when in fact, that principle is impossible to demonstrate. Instead, use the opportunity to discuss the new technology and excite the public.

Some magicians research technological breakthroughs to inspire new magic trick plots and methods. Below you will find a collection of videos a GADFLY might use to develop the next amazing illusion:

THE INFINITE CORRIDOR

In 2005, viewers of PBS’s home-renovation program, “This Old House,” saw host Kevin O’Connor wandering down the Infinite Corridor, pausing in front of a door at the junction of Building 4 and Building 8, and saying something like “Materials Science and Engineering – I wonder what goes on in here.”

VITAL SIGNS CAMERA

“You can check a person’s vital signs – pulse, respiration and blood pressure – manually or by attaching sensors to the body,” reports David L. Chandler. “But a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program is working on a system that could measure these health indicators just by putting a person in front of a low-cost camera such as a laptop computer’s built-in webcam.”

OSCILLATING GELS

David L. Chandler from the MIT News Office says, “Self-oscillating gels are materials that continuously change back and forth between different states — such as color or size — without provocation from external stimuli. These changes are caused by the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction, which was discovered during the 1950s. Without stirring or other outside influence, wave patterns from this chemical reaction can develop within the material or cause the entire gel itself to pulsate.”

HOLOGRAPHIC TV

Larry Hardesty, reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas says there were “a slew of prototype 3-D TVs, but if new research from the MIT Media Lab is any indication, holographic TVs could be close behind.”

“A standard 3-D movie camera captures light bouncing off of an object at two different angles, one for each eye. But in the real world, light bounces off of objects at an infinite number of angles. Holographic video systems use devices that produce so-called diffraction fringes, fine patterns of light and dark that can bend the light passing through them in predictable ways. A dense enough array of fringe patterns, each bending light in a different direction, can simulate the effect of light bouncing off of a three-dimensional object.”

When the hunger for democracy had reached its peek in 1776, our Founding Fathers introduced the Declaration of Independence. They envisioned a government of the people; a representative government.

But the only reason to have representatives is because the whole of the United States population cannot personally appear in Congress to debate the issues. Moreover, many citizens in those days were illiterate – incapable of reading a bill, let alone casting their vote.

Today, some people suggest Americans could simply use the Internet to represent themselves. Ordinary citizens would propose legislative initiatives, and then a massive online vote ratifies the bill into law or leaves it defeated at the keyboard.

Security is a major flaw in the online government concept. Citizens might be inclined to vote more than once, other countries may potentially gain access, or those without Internet service might not be able to vote at all.

By 2035, however, nanotech brain injections – a combination of nanobots and stem cells – may allow the rank and file population to appear in Congress on their own behalf, from the comfort of home, while asleep.

The small, half-biological, half-technological devices, stripped of our current understanding of software, are safe in comparison. Their Internet connection, provided through a Frequency Modulation similar to how mice communicate with one another, is encrypted based on a DNA private key system.

Though many people are terrified of the robotic brain cell concept, it will be an easy pill to swallow in twenty-four years. The slippery slope of human improvement has produced a shocking path, from mercury in our teeth to archaic medical practices scarier than a Rob Zombie movie on acid.

Technological pros and cons aside, imagine the consequences of voting with the subconscious. If you shopped for clothes using only your subconscious, it is quite possible outfits would be bizarre (a desk instead of a shirt for instance), the wrong size, or clothes shopping bypassed altogether when the brain jumps to another thought process.

Of course, there are some who – from looking at elected officials – feel we are already voting in our sleep. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to be sure.