Orlan

I wish! Yes, the better you get at riffle shuffling, the more it will approximate a faro shuffle (meaning less "clumps" and more singles alternating) in some parts of the deck, but it's the repetition that makes it random. If you have accidentally mastered a perfect tabled faro without deliberate practice, I'd like to shake your hand and read your book (or video) on the technique!

Perhaps we can caveat that the person is not cutting perfectly at 26 every time and performing perfect out faros, then we can assume they'll be mixed enough. :-)

It's been a while since I've read Persi Diaconis' paper (who coined the 7 shuffles thing), but I believe all your main concerns were addressed. Not sure about the sleeved deck thing, that wasn't probably a consideration.

August 22–24 at the Revolution Hall in Portland

So… see you at Magic Live?

How’s your progress going? I read The Memory Book (Harry Lorayne) 20 years ago, and have always been interested, but assumed it would take years to be proficient. Wasn’t until I read Moonwalking With Einstein that I realized that with consistent practice it doesn’t need to take that long.

Life has gotten in the way, so I haven’t been consistent with practice. Have also been procrastinated by jumping between books (Dominic O’Brien, Harry Lorayne, Nelson Dellis, others) trying to compare methods.

Penn has mentioned a few times on his podcast that him and Rob Pike are good friends from way back, and has shared several anecdotes.

One I remember and found funny was that one time Penn saw Rob talking to someone, and Rob asked for their phone number. From Penn’s vantage point he sees Rob pick a pen and paper and mimics writing the phone number, but doesn’t write anything at all. When he questions Rob about it he says something to the effect of “Oh, I can just memorize a phone number without a problem, but if I say that out loud they’ll think I’m blowing them off or I’m not really interested in the number, so it’s easier to just fake write it”.

For me, it was Skittles! I traveled to the UK, bought some Skittles, and almost spit them out (blackcurrant instead of grape). Had to look up what it was. Still haven’t tried the real thing, only in candy form.

Nice! I remember learning about Cronhub when the original developer was building in public on social media, back in 2019. I remember thinking it was a cool idea, and even recommended it to a friend that was running a startup and was having some issues with failing cron jobs.

Cool to see that it’s still around and profitable! Yeah, maintenance of an inherited codebase is hard, but happy to see that someone took over it.

Perhaps there were special deals in place for high profile podcasts?

I’ve never used the Apple Podcast app, and only learned about the Apple only features while listening to John Carreyrou‘s podcast during the Theranos trial. They had member only episodes (paid) which were only accesible using Apple’s app, but they also had a public RSS feed which excluded those members only episodes.

The Spanish “scene” has been around for a while! I have a friend who moved to Spain in the 90s to study under Ascanio. After Ascanio, Tamariz and the late Gabi Pareras seem to have the biggest influences, but Gabi was not well known outside of Spain (until his later years). Only got to see him once in London.

Tamariz is still a big influence in the magic scene of course, but DaOrtiz and his Villa Kaps seem to be expanding the circle at a faster pace for the next generation.

(Not Spanish, from Puerto Rico now living in the US, and very much into the topic. =) )

And Luis Olmedo - 2022 FISM winner! Great act.

Plus many more.

If you enjoyed reading this article, you’ll probably also enjoy Joshua Jay’s book How Magicians Think. Among other things, he describes the experience of spending a few days visiting Tamariz.

There’s a significant number of magicians worldwide that have learned Spanish just to spend time around Spain and around other Spanish magicians.

This OS "upgrade" has been annoying. At least I'm not the only one with issues, and I have some of the same issues listed listed here. I hadn't seen them documented elsewhere.

I waited until the first point release to upgrade in hope of a seamless transition, but instead I've been keeping a list of issues. I've been meaning to do a writeup (or at lease a tweet), but haven't done so for the same reason I still haven't spent time trying to fix them. It's many small annoying things. There might be a way to fix some of them (like the generic icons for some filetypes, or my NAS not mounting at startup, or Finder constantly crashing), but so far I've decided to keep my sanity.