Science Comedian

Zoe Keating Performs at ETech 2009

March 14th, 2009

One of the many high­lights of the Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence was the Wednes­day evening per­for­mance of Zoe Keat­ing: “Using a 17th Cen­tury Instru­ment to Cre­ate the Music of the 21st Century.”

Zoe uses a cello and a lap­top to make beau­ti­ful mul­ti­lay­ered music. She plays with her­self.  It’s loopy.  Very cool.

Excuse the rough cam­era work up front – it was shot on a tiny Flip cam­era – and it gets much bet­ter a cou­ple min­utes in when I get to the closeups.

Link:  http://www.zoekeating.com/

Hi-Tech Magic Teaser

March 11th, 2009

At the end of the Sifta­bles ses­sion, I met Seth Raphael (also here), who was sit­ting two seats over from me.  We also hap­pen to be shar­ing a stage together tonight at the LateTech event – I’ll be doing sci­ence com­edy and Seth presents “a new tech­no­log­i­cal magic show.”

In the three or four min­utes we spoke, Seth gave me an absolutely amaz­ing demon­stra­tion of his abilities.

He told me that when top hats and hand­ker­chiefs were in style magi­cians devel­oped pre­sen­ta­tions mak­ing use of them.  But they are no longer in style.  So, as a mod­ern magi­cian, he draws from more mod­ern materials.

His demon­stra­tion involved a Google search that I defined.

He asked me to type two ran­dom words into the search field but not to hit Enter yet.  I typed “tur­tle opin­ion.”  He sug­gested I add a third word because my two words were going to gen­er­ate too many hits.  I added “candy.”

He jot­ted some­thing down on a piece of scratch paper that I provided.

Then he asked me to hit Enter on my Google search and, as I did, he quickly put his paper face­down.   He esti­mated that it took him about a third of a sec­ond to do so.  The Google search took slightly less time.

Now here’s the amaz­ing part:

Seth had writ­ten down on the piece of paper the num­ber 2,510,001.

Google returned 2,510,000 results.

Then, appar­ently off the top of his head, he typed in a url at About.com that he claimed is the one result/page that Google missed.

And, as a bonus, there was another num­ber that he’d first writ­ten and then scratched out…  it was 3,540,000.  And, when we removed “candy” from the search, so that it was sim­ply on “tur­tle opin­ion,” that was exactly how many results the search returned.

How did he do it?

I can’t wait to see what else he has up his vir­tual sleeve.