Astounding Fact #1 - A shuffled deck of cards is unique
Properly shuffle a deck of 52 cards and you will be holding a combination that has never before been seen in history, and never will again… a fact an excellent magician like my friend Lee Warren would benefit from pointing out when dazzling audiences with his close up magic.
There are 52! ways to arrange 52 cards. That’s “52 factorial” for those who may have forgotten their probability class (52 x 51 x 50 etc.. all the way to 1). Factorials get large really quickly and this one turns out to be 8.1 x 10^67.
Sheldon, in an episode of the Big Bang Theory, writes this number down on his board when he can’t figure out Howard’s card trick using maths.
Big huh? But how big? We humans don’t have an intuitive grasp of big numbers, because we can write them down pretty easily. To give you an idea:
- There are fewer stars than this in the entire visible universe. Way fewer.
- If everyone on Earth shuffled a deck of cards properly randomly a billion times a year for a billion years, they wouldn’t stand a chance of shuffling the same arrangement twice.
(Incidentally, it’s combinatorics like this that allowed me to create the solution checker for The Looking Glass Club puzzles without fearing someone could use it to cheat to win the prize of up to a million pounds.)
This awesome piece of scientific research appears to suggest memories (or at least some of them) are stored at the neuron level. I don’t think the conclusions are especially robust, but the research itself is a wonderful example of bleeding edge science!
If you ever wondered what the autopaparazzi looked like in The Looking Glass Club, they look something like this. #thefutureisalreadyhere
I was interviewed this week on Gaydar Radio (for the wonderful Neil & Debbie show) and I got to levitate the Earth, as well as talk about the book and the future of technology!
MakerBot industries have released a new dual-colour 3D printer and to announce it, they’ve made a wonderful stop-motion story featuring a little princess, printed at the beginning of the story.
Well worth a watch. Remember, if you haven’t got a few grand to spend on a 3D printer (only a few years ago they were ten times that price!) and still want to play with 3D printing, you can always visit our competition sponsor Shapeways.
Gruff
The lovely Hannah Murray of Talk Radio Europe interviewed Gruff for her hugely popular Book Show, asking where the inspiration for the metaphysical thriller came from and what is the book really about. And how do you solve all those puzzles?
Listen to the full interview here.
Gruff
Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars
Here’s another technology from science fiction that’s already here today in prototype form and quite likely to be on the streets quite soon.
http://mashable.com/2011/05/11/google-self-driving-cars-nevada/
It won’t be long before all cars are self-driving. The chances are, in time, software will be able to control a car far more safely than a human can. And your car will always be happy to be the nominated driver when you go for a drink.
Gruff
Print your own bikinis…
This is what happens when 3D printing technology meets fashion.
The clever ladies at Continuum have developed algorithms that allow them to print and sell bikinis and dresses designed exclusively for, or even by, you.
Awesome stuff. Check it out:
http://www.thelookingglassclub.com/print-your-own-bikinis/
Technologies of 2035, today
If you thought the vision of 2035 painted in The Looking Glass Club seemed too advanced, take a look at some of these extraordinary prototypes that already exist today. From 3D printers to invisibility cloaks. Yep, really. You may change your mind.
http://www.thelookingglassclub.com/technologies-of-2035-today/
This is the first in a small series of articles.
I hope you enjoy reading them.
Gruff
Looking past the Looking Glass Club…
Happy belated Easter to everyone. I’m only just recovering from a nasty bronchial flu-type infection which floored me over Easter, hence the radio silence. Quick thanks to everyone who’s emailed/tweeted/facebook messaged me. It’s always lovely to hear from people, especially when the feedback is so wonderfully positive.
Only a couple of people seemed to have disliked The Looking Glass Club, so far, enough to write negative reviews on Amazon anyway, and even those reviews have tried to be constructive and the points made seem largely to be a matter of personal taste. I don’t think one could hope for more as a writer, frankly. It’s even more encouraging given that people are ten times more likely to write a review of something they didn’t like than something they did. (By quoting this statistic, I am, of course, thinly disguising a call to action to write a nice review for LGC on Amazon if you haven’t already!)
Some questions from readers seem to crop up regularly, the most common of which is, what am I working on next, and is there a sequel to LGC.
Yes, there IS a sequel (of course!). It’s called Wonderland, but I can’t give you a release date yet because, well, I haven’t written it yet; it’s still mostly in my head and in notes in every conceivable format, paper and electronic.
Wonderland, probably won’t, however, be my next published novel. LGC was pretty intense to write, and I needed a break from that world, so some time ago I started on an unrelated novel called Supernova - also an SF Thriller. I plan to finish Supernova before embarking on Wonderland. The good news is, it’s going very well, and I’m very excited about the project. It certainly won’t take as long to write as LGC did and I hope to have a first draft ready later this year.
I’m not going to say much about what it’s about, except that I’m exploring more big ideas in physics and philosophy that I find fascinating. I hope you will too. It’s a much more straight-forward story and style this time though, and the ideas are simpler to convey, so hopefully it will be accessible to a wider readership.
What else? Oh, there’s a little LGC-themed game coming out shortly on the LGC website. It’s silly, funny and bears only the vaguest relationship to the book (we thought it was more important to make it fun than thematically accurate). There will be a news release about that when it’s out. If you’re a gamer, and fancy beta testing it, do let us know via the contact form.
That’s it for now!
Gruff
