I listen to the Radiolab podcast often and was happy to hear a story about magic their latest episode called "Black Box" which was published last week. The second story is about Sydney and Lesley Piddington, two then-famous mentalists who had a really powerful radio act where they would somehow transmit a randomly selected sentence from one location to another (often across the globe) without obviously speaking the words over the radio for the revealing, distant magician to hear. At one point, they had an audience of 20 million listeners! All they would say is "You are the judge" when people asked them how they did it. People thought they must have had some verbal code or system to do this, but no one has ever been able to verify the method to this day, although some magicians seem very confident in their best guesses and know that they could recreate it using their own methods of choice.
Check it out here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/ (Play the "You Are The Judge" story which is ~30 minutes)
One of my favorite parts of this story is the challenge that Penn Jillette puts forward at the end before he explains the secret. It parallels the discussion about the importance of wonder in some of the T11 google hangouts (which I hope come back!). Penn gives his best guess about the method on their website, but its up to the listener if they want to have the mystery ruined or not. Pretty cool and respectful approach in my opinion.
Check it out here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/ (Play the "You Are The Judge" story which is ~30 minutes)
One of my favorite parts of this story is the challenge that Penn Jillette puts forward at the end before he explains the secret. It parallels the discussion about the importance of wonder in some of the T11 google hangouts (which I hope come back!). Penn gives his best guess about the method on their website, but its up to the listener if they want to have the mystery ruined or not. Pretty cool and respectful approach in my opinion.
