Comment by dylan604
1 day ago
As with anything in life, when it's what you know and do on the regular, that simple thing can look like magic to others. I met an old timer in the satellite business that came out to help install our receiver for a new TV channel the company I was at was getting off the ground. He found out what bird we were using and what its slot was. Based on that, he knew how many satellites over from the satellite he knew and used as his base. It was a long time running TV channel that he could find very quickly. Once that bird was located, he just manually (literally pushed the dish with his hand) counting the number of satellites that came in/out of view until he landed on "our" bird. Once there, connected our receiver and baddaboom baddabing, there it was. Once the satellite was pointed at the proper angle to the south, it took less than five minutes from him connecting his receiver to verify his base signal to packing up and heading off the roof.
His base satellite signal was unencrypted and a main reason he used it for this purpose. Our channel was scrambled, and only verifiable after our receiver with the decoder was connected. It was impressive seeing someone that good at their job make it look so easy, but after he explained the layman's version of orbital slots it became less magical. This is why magicians are meant to not tell you how the trick is done.
This story gave me an odd burst of hope, thank you.
Eh I kind of feel like you can't say that. If something is magical before you learn how it's done, it should be magical after. The magical part isn't "it's actually impossible", but "it's so far from what I could come up on my own", which still holds after you know the secret.
Yes, some excellent magic tricks work even better when you know how they work, especially if they’re the kind that’s based on putting in ridiculous amounts of work or skill/practice.
Penn and Teller play a lot with that idea, for example.
I think I respect Penn and Teller as magicians more since they reveal how some of their tricks work, and yeah the sheer amount of skill required is for some of their tricks is impressive.
I also liked watching The Masked Magician share some behind the scenes of tricks, and even knowing how it's done doesn't make the trick any less impressive.
You should hide the secret if it’s ugly, but you can expose if it’s beautiful (and it’s your trick!)