Higgypop's Blog
The Laziest Fraudster Ever?Thu 26 Nov 2009 at 00:51
Usually it's a stupidly elaborate story about the lost inheritance of a middle-eastern king who was shot dead in battle, in a change to convention, an email plopped in to my inbox this week with the subject "hello you ready to recieve your atm card".
All that the first email said in it was "hello", he couldn't even be bother to use a capital 'H'!
The rest of the email conversation went as follows...
Me: Great, thanks!
Scammer: Can you come down here and get you approval slip to sign. At the bank.
Me: Yeah sure, no problem. Where do I need to go?
Scammer: Very good. Come to Nigeria. In the next email give me your flight details.
For a bank card? I can't imagine the uptake on this particular scam being very high.
My Friend Did Amazingly on X Factor Last Night!Sun 11 Oct 2009 at 00:38
I think I dreamt about it because I watch a few Deal Or No Deal on 4OD yesterday and then sat through the whole TWO HOURS of The X Factor and I think my brain merged my mate in DOND with X Factor.
So in the dream, I was watching the X Factor and my mate was in the final 12 but I don't know how he got there because he was the worst by far, he's singing was awful and he was certain to get voted out.
But before his performance they showed a clip of Dannii Minogue who had this weird hydraulic clothes rail. It was like a T-shape and you could hang clothes on the horizontal bar and the vertical poll could by hydraulically extended and contracted to let you alter the height of the clothes rail(???).
Dannii was really upset in this clip because her hydraulic clothes rail was broken, it wouldn't go up and down. Then, my mate, after his performance brought out a brand new clothes rail which look amazing, it looked better than the original one and he gave it to Dannii and told her he had made it. It was built using a coat stand and some other things from his dressing room.
Because he had been so nice to Dannii the audience loved him even though his singing was rubbish and the public kept him in.
Then later the judges were in a crowd of people talking to some journalists about him and they couldn't believe he had made the clothes rail himself and then Louis said my mate had been given a contract with someone and they were going to be mass producing his clothes rail.
So it ended up more like Dragon's Den!! Anyone any good at dreaming meanings? What does all this mean? Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas.
Derren Brown: How He Did ItSat 12 Sep 2009 at 00:42
Since then everyone has been speculating about how he might have done it and we were all waiting for 9 o'clock yesterday evening when Derren was going to reveal to us how he managed to correctly predict all six numbers.
At 9pm last night Derren was back on our screens in an hour long showed entitled 'How To Win The Lottery', but did he tell us? ...ummm, may be. Derren basically gave us his three ways he considered to correctly predict the lottery numbers.
How To Win The Lottery
1. Fake a lottery ticket
2. Genuinely predict the numbers
3. Fix the machine
Before I go in to those three options, I want to address the fourth option, the most common theory among internet speculators, a camera trick.
4. Use a camera trick
There is no denying that the easiest way to perform and explain this trick is that during Wednesday night's live show. The left hand-side of the screen was covered with a static image which allowed a helper to come in replace the blank balls with numbered balls as they were drawn. Derren didn't show his prediction before claiming that he wasn't legally allowed to show the numbers before the BBC broadcast the live draw.
This does seem like a simple solution to the trick but it's not how Derren does magic, in all of his past shows he has never used camera tricks or accomplices. So for me, even though this is the most obvious way to perform the trick, I would like to think that Derren wouldn't have resorted to this cheap trick, I'll explain why in a bit more details later.
1. Fake a lottery ticket
Derren quickly discredited this option for obvious reasons, it wouldn't make much of a TV show and it is of course illegal. So we can easily scratch that option off of our list.
2. Genuinely predict the numbers
Derren spent most of the show exploring this option, starting off by proving to us that he can easily predict the choices that humans make. We all know however that Derren isn't a mind reader, so was he predicting his volunteers choices or was he influencing them so that they came to the same conclusion as he wanted them to? Again, keep this question in mind, I will come back to it later.
Derren then went on to tell us how he predicted the numbers, using a principle called "The Wisdom of Crowds". We were told that the principle is based around the tale of Francis Galton's surprise when a crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.
So Derren used a crowd to pick the numbers, a group of 24 volunteers who were each asked to pick six numbers, their numbers were added together and the averages for the six numbers worked out, Derren then picked the six corresponding numbered balls and ran off to the studio from which Wednesday night's show was broadcast.
My problem with this is that wisdom can't help you predicting a random event, the wisdom of the crowd could successfully give you the six most commonly drawn numbers based on past information.
If Derren was armed with the six most commonly selected number, they would be the most likely to be selected again but as a stand-alone draw those number are no more likely than any other combination.
3. Fix the machine
When I first heard Derren seriously talking about this option at the end of the show I thought it was ridiculous, but the more I think about it, the more I realise it is the kind of thing Derren could pull off and I think there are a few clues which point to this.
Firstly, here's how Derren explained that the lottery machine could be tampered with, he started his explanation with the disclaimer "to fix the lottery I would have to of done the following, which of course if I had done, I could never admit to. So I certainly did not do any of these which would clearly be illegal. But if I did, which I didn't, I would have to of done the following..."
a) Firstly, get someone working on the lottery show to act as an inside informant
b) Find a window of opportunity when the balls weren't going to be checked
c) Manufacture the necessary eight sets of replica, weighted lottery balls
d) Find out from the informant where the balls were secretly stored and gain access by hypnotising the security guards and switch the six balls
e) During the draw the six weighted balls would be spat out by the lottery machine first
f) The next day the balls were switched back
In Derren's special, 'The Heist' over the course of a week he convinced four normal business men and women to rob a security van at gun point. As this project took him years, isn't it likely that he could have spent those months using similar techniques to convince a BBC/Camelot employee to leak the required information. Then, like Ashani, the girl who Derren made forget that she could play piano in an epsiode of 'Trick or Treat', Derren could have made the informant forget that they ever had any contact with him.
I'm no expert on lottery machines but I'd imagine that the six weight balls still aren't defiantly going to roll out first but being weighted they would have a much higher chance of selection.
The clues which point to option 3 as being a viable option for me is that the show was really about influencing rather than predicting, so Derren's 24 volunteers didn't predict any numbers, he may have just used suggestion to get them to pick numbers which averaged out at his pre-chosen winning lottery numbers.
Derren said that Channel 4 wouldn't let him buy a lottery ticket, if they had predicted the lottery numbers only minutes before as Derren stated in option 2, then it would be too late to buy a lottery ticket anyway and it would be of no concern to Channel 4. If, however Derren told Channel 4 he was rigging the lottery then you can understand why they would ban him from buying a ticket.
Why didn't Derren show the numbers before the draw then? By not showing the numbers before, there is no real proof that Derren tampered with the machine. He has perfectly covered his track, if Camelot investigate he can still claim that the numbers were selected by his volunteers and there is no other physical evidence that points to any tampering.
Derren ended the showing by saying that if he is ever asked how he predicted the lottery numbers, he will say "it was just a trick".
How Did Derren Predict the Lottery Results?Thu 10 Sep 2009 at 00:47
Last night, live at 22:35 on Channel 4, E4, Film Four... basically every channel with 4 on the end, Derren Brown successfully predicted the results of the UK National Lottery as part of a new mini-series called 'The Event'
Now of course he didn't, that is impossible. He didn't reveal the numbers until after the draw so the trick was that in real-time he got the lottery number to display on to six blank white balls which were in shot with him on screen for the whole time during the lottery draw.
So, how it worked. Derren walks in to a big, open, empty room with a camera man. Also in the room is the six balls on a stand which appeared to be transparent and a TV which showed the live draw from the BBC as it happened. Once the draw was complete Derren rotated the balls in the stand to show that the numbers on the balls matched those just randomly selected in the live lottery draw.
So, how did he do it?
The Theories
1. People are saying the left hand-side of the screen is static and someone just replaces the balls.
But what about the shaky camera?
a) there is an identical room and the motion on the two cameras is tracked and duplicated
b) the camera shake is a digital manipulation of the footage
WRONG: It's a hand held camera, you see the camera man and there's no point where they could smoothly make the transition between hand held and a tracked rig and no rig is visible in the long shot.
2. Remember Derren's show The System where he spent the whole day tossing a coin until he got ten 'heads' in a row. In last night's show Derren mentions that this is the result of a year's work so some people are suggesting he filmed every possible out come.
WRONG: Do the maths, there are 13,983,816 possible combinations, there is only 525,948 minutes in a year.
3. A common explanation is that the balls had some kind of LED lights built in or that the numbers were projected on to the balls.
WRONG: You can't project a dark area on to a white ball with any kind of light or projector, the whole area was too well lit.
4. The numbers were printed on to the balls. Most people are suggesting some king of ink jet printer built in to the stand.
POSSIBLE: But I think the technique is slightly out of goose. As chum of mine Scofield said, you could have a printer in the base of the tray which prints the numbers and then rotated them 90 degrees upwards ready for Derren to reveal... that could work.
Another possible adaption of these technique is to use some kind of light sensitive ink or a thermal printing technique. He could have coated the balls in a thermal ink, similar to the way supermarket receipts work (to see what I mean hold a lighter under a receipt and watch it change black).
In the same way you can project an image on to a TV screen with a beam of electrons, could a similar technique have been used to print on the balls? Some kind of laser or invisible EM beam which would heat or react with the coating on the balls to turn the black.
This is the most likely explanation for me but I'm still not really happy with this theory as the numbers on balls aren't neatly lined up in the tray as you would expect them to be, but then they could have been displaced when Derren spun the tray around to show us.
Cameras
Derren made a point of telling us that there are two cameras, a handheld one and fixed long shot. However, they only ever use the long shot was only used once. This could be part of the misdirection. Either the long shot was only there so we could be shown (or made to believe) that the other camera was hand held or it was there to film how the trick is really done ready for tomorrow night's reveal.
My Conclusion
I don't how he did this trick is important as clearly it is impossible to predict the winning lottery numbers. I think the important question is why did he trick us? What is this leading to? I think we're possibly overlooking something really simple here.
Derren will put our minds to rest on a show tomorrow night at 9pm called 'How To Win the Lottery'.