Ricky Jay is amazing. I went to a screening of the recent documentary about him, Deceptive Practice[1], which he attended and subsequently answered questions---enjoyed it immensely.
The eye-opening and amazing part is the unrelenting practice, preparation, and study time Ricky Jay (and others in the documentary) have committed to the art.
Beautiful and inspiring to see that effort from people.
Communication without that symbol is not so difficult if you work for it. I can usually do it orally if I try, although it's most straightforward with typing. As HN participants might know, lipography is a strong tradition which boasts many amusing artifacts (including famous books, of which Christian Bök's is most obviously worth buying).
I'd think things would go similarly with Javascript. :-) If you don't want AJAX and local tasks such as validation, you can still construct practical stuff without it.
(Most of my oral discussions with folks work practically without using Javascript... I'm not as optimistic about my browsing, though!)
"Good job! I sought to say what I thought about your post in a similar fashion, but I found it wasn't as straightforward in actuality as it was in my anticipation."
This constraint is not what you could call most hard of all constraints that folks can comply with in writing. Many moons ago, I had many chats with a smart woman (an IT industry analyst, nowadays a VC!) using only four-symbol words (words just as long, or just as short, as "full" and "with"). All right, it wasn't always an option for us to comply fully with standard grammar; a substantial fraction of our writing did consist of partial phrasings (lacking a noun, or lacking an additional pars orationis, as folks would say in Latin -- say, "good work" and not "that's a good job"). Still, that woman and I could chat for a fairly long duration in this fashion, about a surprisingly broad array of topics.
I wish I had logs of our chats now, inasmuch as that constraint is fairly hard... I do think I said "Good Airs" in such a chat as a way of naming a capital city of a country south of Brazil. But much that I said is hard to think of now.
For folks following this discussion, I don't know about Anglic works, but I think "la disparition"[0] and "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[1] show outstanding illustrations of lipograms for Italians and Gauls.
Also, at MIT's annual January puzzling match, I had fun solving this most-common-thousand-words thing (it has a list of cool stuff that you can study at MIT if you want to know how to build flying things... but all in most-common-thousand-words-only fashion).
Links aren't usually one of the things you expect to require javascript for, although obviously in some cases when the page tries to override default window/tab management (hissboo) it makes sense. It's more like disallowing images, and all the text shows up right-to-left. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old person, but I'm tired of people overengineering things. Your website isn't super-special and it doesn't need its own javascript "viewer application". Then again, I'm aware I'm well outside the mainstream in holding that opinion.
I wish browsers had options to display memory and CPU usage per tab, right on the tab. That would end a lot of BS real quick... "Why does this website look so bland, yet uses 20 times the resources of this other, fast, and pretty site?"
If all websites that don't really need javascript for anything but bling that makes marketeers happy and users miserable got rid of it tomorrow, worldwide, I wonder how many coal power plants could be shut down?
There is one way to find out, and one step to get there is to not put up with this nonsense anymore. Driving a car with the handbrakes on to get a pack of cigarettes is not modern, not progress, not sophisticated, and not exactly dignified either.
As someone that develops websites for a living, I think making sites accessible to everyone is my number one priority. It would be one thing if the site said, "you need to enable javascript to view content" but this site just says, "page not found."
Also, I don't appreciate the sarcastic tone of your comment. It's not necessary and I can see by the comments below that you are wrong and out of line.
Why is javascript "critical" here? It's really critical, as in there's no other way to go from viewing one set of text to another set of text on a page without javascript?
This site cannot be reproduced without images or the letter "e". It can be reproduced without javascript. Trivially.
Reading through this whole article was really interesting. The mention in the article of mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis prompted me to search previous Hacker News threads about him. Quite a while ago, another participant posted a link to an article from 2011 in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Diaconis, titled "The Magical Mind of Persi Diaconis,"[1] which didn't gain much karma or discussion at the time of submission but is also an interesting read. Different conjurers can have very different personal styles and techniques, each to fit their own personalities, and the best conjurers admire the work of other conjurers.
Magic is really cool. I have been getting into the Dynamo show and watched all the David Blaine specials, and after watching a lot of it, I started to get the idea behind a lot of the hand tricks, but there are definitely some tricks that have me completely baffled to this day.
I just came across the show, carbonaro effect, where the magician uses everyday stores to play tricks on unsuspecting people. I like this shows concept because its less about how he did the trick and more about how easy it is too fool people into believing in otherworldly events or products.
Most of the TV stuff is not the same thing though. I know people who have had paid work as 'audience' for those. You put a trained actor in normal clothes and people watching on TV will swear blind that they could not have faked their reaction.
Just assume that everyone 'from the audience' who participates in any kind of magic is a shill. No matter if it is on TV, at a party, in a restaurant, or in the street.
Not always. I got invited from the audience when I was a kid for a stage magic show.
The guy was doing a trick where he wrote on a ping pong ball, gave it to me to look at, destroyed it and then made it reappear.
While I was looking at it I marked it with my thumbnail.
When it reappeared he asked me to verify that it was the same, but it didn't have the nail-mark on it, so I told him that it definitely wasn't, and how I knew.
I was 12 and my parents were furious with me about it.
For some reason they never ever took me to a magic show again.
Heh, I could probably talk to a shrink for several days solid about that.
In their view at the time I ruined it for everyone and wasted the money of the entire audience and possibly ruined the career of the poor magician too and if I had any kind of feeling for others I would have played along and just lied. It was socially unacceptable behaviour, apparently. I found the whole thing completely bewildering.
Classic article, and Ricky Jay is the real deal. But the first two tricks mentioned can be explained by the use of confederates: Gregory Mosher for the first and "Mort" in the second.
I thought the Mort bit might have been revealed to be that he planted 52 cards in obscure locations around the room and directed his firing of cards to locations known to have particular cards. (E.g., down the table for hearts, behind him for clubs, etc.) He apparently does have an incredible memory.
That said, the story said he did it the length of the table, which implies a more natural specificity which could either confirm a confederate, or else was retrospectively embellished.
(Imagine a version of the story where he turns and fires the cards into a bookshelf and instructs someone to open a particular book.)
But the confederate is a much simpler explanation. It's just whether the coordination and trust in a confederate to keep the secret to the grave can be greater than the cost of the setup and the potential for early revelation.
The saddest part of that whole story came at the end when the library of magic-related literature and artifacts Ricky Jay helped amass and curate fell into the hands of David Copperfield.
Not sure what the tech world equivalent of that would be--maybe a nouveau riche Tinder founder acquiring all the original artifacts of historic computing in the Computer History Museum, moving them to Branson, Missouri, and putting them backstage of a Yakov Smirnoff dinner theatre show.
I love card and coin magic. Good old purist stuff without gimmicks or trick decks. Sleight of hand is simply pure talent. Even the description of the poker trip had me cracking a smile.
His incredible 52 Assistants show is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jljt5Ml28FU
[1] http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/