Tag: adrian

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We're Smart People and We Mean Well

By now, many of you will know about Facebook’s experimental study in which they attempted (successfully, they claim) to make their users sadder or happier by manipulating their News Feeds – without their informed consent. To call the study controversial would be an understatement. Unethical, arrogant, and bone-headed would be a little more accurate.

Beyond the critical question of ethics and the dubious scientific worth of the study lies the fascinating reaction from Facebook and from the wider technology community (by which I mean prominent venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and developers). It’s best to look at this reaction in comparison to other tech-related uproars that have engulfed the internet. Take the political issues like SOPA and net neutrality, for example. The whole tech community lent their voices and their wallets to internet-side of those movements, and they were all very happy to assume that their antagonists (‘old media’ businesses, etc.) were flat-out evil and greedy reactionaries.

When the tables are turned and Facebook is under attack for running a psychological experiment on its users, we hear… nothing at all. Radio silence from VCs and leaders of big companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and any other brand-name tech company. Those who are brave enough to defend Facebook usually comes from a place of utter bafflement: “We technologists are smart people and we mean well – isn’t that enough for you? In fact, the problem isn’t with what Facebook has done, it’s with your foolish and imperfect understanding of it. Here, let me explain it to your irrational, inconsistent child-like mind so that you can see how we’re trying to help you, and after I’m done you will praise us!”

The most common defence of Facebook invokes A/B testing, routine experiments companies run all the time in order to optimise their websites and apps. There are two real responses to this assertion:

1. “A/B testing” is too vague a term for useful comparison in this case; one might as well say that “experiments” are either all good or bad. Testing two two versions of a website selling hats and seeing which one version in more clicks on the “Buy” button? No-one has a problem with this, because when you’re on a retail website, you have a reasonable expectation that the owners are optimising their commercial message (just as Starbucks might optimise the names of their drinks). But what if Google A/B tested its search ranking algorithms in order to make you feel more positive about the US government? I don’t think we’d be too happy about that. Which leads us to:

2. Facebook (and indeed, Google) is different to most websites. It is a place where users want to keep up to date with their friends and family; it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s a lens through which a billion people view the world. People using Facebook are not expecting that they are being actively manipulated there; at least not in a way that directly acts against their interests (i.e. to make them sadder).

You might say that this attitude is naive and we should be suspicious of everyone and everything. And indeed we are, in certain places. When we watch TV or read a newspaper and see an advert, we know that the advert is trying to manipulate us and it’s something that most of us accept, even if we aren’t too happy about it. But that’s why it’s crucial that adverts are clearly identified – not just on TV, not just in newspapers, but also in tweets and Facebook posts. You need to know what is and what isn’t commercial speech.

I suspect that technologists would rather not think about the ethics of A/B testing, which is used so widely precisely because it’s a very powerful manipulative tool that can change users’ behaviour, earning you millions or even billions more. Perhaps they’re worried that Facebook’s study might unleash regulation on A/B testing in general, or any kind of user manipulation. And, frankly, they are right to be worried. I suspect that the blithe nature of Facebook’s experiment will make people very worried about the other kinds of studies going on in private.

Yet rather than directly engage with people who criticise Facebook’s practices, their defenders instead think that we are stupid. It almost feels like they have completely internalised the messianic mission of Silicon Valley, where every disruptive startup is out to “save the world”, a stance which conveniently requires any right-thinking and ethical entrepreneur to make shit-tons of money by manipulating their users as fast as they can (in order to reach scale, etc.).

Disagree with Facebook and you disagree with the mission. Disagree with the mission, and you are an evil person.

Of course, there is a bit more to this story than what I’ve already said. Many Silicon Valley people subscribe to a utilitarian calculus of ethics, which appeals to their rational, big data personalities. Thus they might also defend Facebook by saying that the company is ultimately trying to increase the sum total of happiness in the world, and they can only do it by conducting these experiments. Ignoring the fact that it would be absolutely impossible to definitively conclude that because we can’t predict the other effects of these experiments (such as the fact that knowing Facebook has such broad control over people’s views of the world might make them sadder), the bigger problem is that there are different standards of ethics out there.

According to my standard of a good life, I would rather not have benevolent masters strapping rose-tinted spectacles onto my face. In other words, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Others may disagree, but that’s the point. There is no single ethics out there. People can have rational disagreements and there is no use to saying that we’re foolish for not wanting to be helped by Facebook. Never has Upton Sinclair’s maxim been truer: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

What is to be done?

I am still on Facebook, although I feel very unhappy about it (hah). There is currently no alternative for me to keep up to date with many of my friends and family. You could say that this makes me a hypocrite, just like the Occupy Wall Street protestor who uses an iPhone – made by a capitalist company that seeks to minimise its tax burden by whatever means necessary.

I don’t think that’s the case. This is the world we live in. You cannot get a phone that isn’t made by a capitalist company. due to economies of scale. I cannot keep up to date with my friends and family in other ways, due to network effects. The goal is to strive towards something else, even if we can’t be perfect while we do it.

To that end, I pledge to donate $1000 to any non-profit or B-corp organisation seeking to replace Facebook’s core social network functions that is able to raise $10 million in total donations.

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10 apps the BBC should make

Over the years, the BBC — which started as a radio service — has chosen to move into new, risky platforms including television, home computing, and the internet. It’s safe to say that we’re all quite happy with how those ventures turned out, so my question is, why stop there? The BBC should raise its digital ambitions to create original interactive experiences for computers, smartphones, and tablets; experiences that inform, educate, and entertain.

I am specifically not talking about apps that distribute or repurpose existing content. While the iPlayer apps for TV and radio are very successful, they don’t involve the creation of new interactive content.

iPlayer

Nor am I talking about websites such as the new educational iWonder brand. iWonder is a very well-written and very nicely designed website and it has some excellent articles, but it is not fundamentally interactive.

iWonder

So what am I talking about? I can best explain with ten examples of genuinely interactive apps that would complement existing BBC TV shows and properties (because, you know, it’s all about brand synergy), and are provably feasible and popular.

1. BBC News = BBC News

BBC News app

Credit where credit is due: the BBC News app is a simple yet decent extension of the BBC News Online website, itself an exceptional BBC property due to its world-leading, online-only nature. It’s arguable that it’s not a particularly interactive app, but then again, I don’t think that making it more interactive would add much.

2. The Sky at Night/Stargazing Live = Star Walk

starwalk

Thanks to presenters like Brian Cox and shows like Stargazing Live, there are plenty of people interested in stargazing and astronomy, but do we really expect them to go outside and fumble around with a compass when they could use something much better – like Star Walk? Want to find Jupiter or identify a constellation? Just point your smartphone in the right direction. It’s augmented reality of the finest kind, providing a supremely accessible and highly educational experience. If you combined Star Walk with audio or video commentary, you could provide viewers with a new stargazing tour every week. Perhaps you could even crowdsource counts of Leonids and Perseids meteor showers. Continue reading “10 apps the BBC should make”

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Perfection, Quantified

I am too lazy to be a good self-quantifier. And yet I persist. I have a Fitbit activity tracker that automatically syncs with the internet whenever I’m near my laptop. For a while it gave me the intense satisfaction of routinely topping the step counts of my friends, reported on Fitbit’s website, until I realised that their totals – and mine – never seemed to change much between weeks.

In the first year, occasionally my daily step count might creep over 20,000 or 30,000 steps and I would get excited about setting a new record. Sadly, that excitement has gone – having reached 45,432 steps on the day of the Edinburgh half-marathon last year, the prospect of going beyond is now confined to, well, marathons.

leaderboard

Even the flicker of pleasure I gained from the Fitbit leaderboard was extinguished by a ‘friend’ I recently added who now consistently beats me. He probably works in a job where he actually has to walk during the day, or something equally unfair. But it still provides entertainment. My girlfriend and I both enjoy walking and I’ll often ask her to guess how many steps we’ve taken so far. She’s gotten really good at this now: “Six thousand… two hundred?” “Six thousand five hundred. Only four percent off!” I’ll marvel. I can’t honestly say that the Fitbit has made me walk any more than I used to, though.

weightbot

Then there’s my internet-connected Withings scales. I got these as a birthday present from my parents (stop laughing – I asked for them, you jackals!). They’re several times more expensive than my old, perfectly-accurate scales, but like the Fitbit they also automatically sync with the internet, so I don’t have to record the figures myself. At a conservative five seconds saved every day, or 30 minutes a year, in the extra time I’ve saved before I die I could watch the entire first season of Friends. Could that be any better?

While, technologically-speaking, the Withings scales do far less than the Fitbit, its ability to show me long-term trends in my weight makes it very far more useful than looking in a mirror and feeling vaguely worried/pleased.

Finally, Foursquare. Over Christmas, we visited my brother in Portland and then my girlfriend’s family in Toronto. Whenever I travel outside of London and visit normal people’s flats and houses, I am always reduced to a raving madman, rending my clothes in fury. “$350,000 for three bedrooms and two point five bathrooms? You can barely get a toilet for that price in London!”

I have a pet theory (which is wrong and offensive, but I’ll continue) that ‘professionals’ in London only stay there because they grew up in ultra-boring places elsewhere in the UK. When they eventually get to London and see the bright lights and such, they accept the horrific house prices as a necessary evil of not living in a place where nothing happens. Continue reading “Perfection, Quantified”

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A Proposal for Managing In-App Spending

This year, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Cooperation network, the EU Justice Minister, and the UK’s Office of Fair Trading have all expressed concerns about consumers being confused or misled about in-app spending; particularly on freemium games, and games aimed at children.

Their recommendations include developers providing better information about the true costs involved in freemium games, and ensuring that children are not exhorted to buy in-app items or persuade an adult to buy items for them. These are a good start but time will tell whether they are effective.

In related gaming (that is, gambling) news, as of this month gamblers in England and Wales will be able to set limits on the amount of time and money spent on high-stakes gaming machines (e.g. slot machines) in betting shops. According to BBC News, there are 33,000 fixed-odds betting terminals across England and Wales, on which approximately £40 billion is gambled and £1.5 billion lost each year. These terminals will now provide alerts to gamblers every 30 minutes or £250 spent. Despite these moves, the UK government said that more could be done, so clearly this is not the end of the road for gambling regulation.

There is a very, very big difference between gambling and (some) freemium games. Freemium games are not even in the same ballpark when it comes to harm against society. However, they also have a few things in common, most notably their use of behavioural psychology and compulsion loops to keep players playing more and spending more. There are plenty of freemium game players who will spend hundreds of hours and many pounds playing them, and then regret their actions afterwards – I know because I was one of them.

What would freemium games look like if they adopted the same kind of limits that fixed-odds betting terminals will have? Here’s a possibility I mocked up:

freemium1

placeit

freemium3

Feel free to repost these images but please link back. These are mockups. Any relation to existing apps is intentional but meant only for comic effect. I welcome any corrections.

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My 2014 Podcasts

Earlier today I tweeted about the podcasts I’d added — and removed — for 2014. A few people asked me about what else I listened to, so here’s a list. I might also write another post about why you should listen to podcasts and how to get set up.

New Additions

The Memory Palace (7 min): The first episode of Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace I listened to was Six Stories, about Otis’ development of the elevator. Lest you think this would somehow be an informative yet dry treatment, let me assure you that it was a beautifully told story about the sheer danger and romance of those early elevators. Six Stories was rebroadcast by 99% Invisible (see below) and convinced me to investigate The Memory Palace further.

I don’t take subscribing to new podcasts lightly — we don’t have unlimited time, after all — so I test them out for a while. The next episode I heard, Shadowboxing, ensured that The Memory Palace immediately exited probation. Shadowboxing was even better than Six Stories, about the life of John L. Sullivan, a champion boxer. There are a lot of conventional ways in which you could tell the story about such a person, but this one was different and its path was satisfyingly unguessable. “Now I get why Nate only podcasts once a month,” I thought. If anything it reminds me of what 99% Invisible was like before Roman Mars (IMHO) mistakenly heeded some listeners’ requests to lengthen the show.

The Memory Palace doesn’t appear to have any ads, which simultaneously pleases and worries me. I should totally go and donate to him right now, and maybe hire him to do an audio tour of some museum I like.

Snap Judgment (50 min): Take 16 minutes and just listen to Where No One Should Go. It has the quality of the very best radio, a personal story that unfolds deliberately and then ratchets the pressure higher and higher and higher. Just don’t listen to it before bedtime.

From NPR and PRX. I cheated a bit on this one because I haven’t listened to many episodes so I’m not fully sure I’ll stay subscribed, but the linked clip was so good that I’m happy to give it a shot.

Harmontown (2 hours): Heard of Community? This podcast is by its showrunner, Dan Harmon, and it’s actually a live recording of a weekly ‘town hall’ stand-up session he does in LA with his friends. About 50-75% of the episodes are absolute gold, full of ridiculous free-wheeling one-up joking, and enhanced by a never-ending cavalcade of guest comics and writers (last week was Mitch Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development). Apparently Robin Williams was on a couple of episodes, so I’m saving those for a rainy day. There’s also usually a live D&D session at the end as well.

The remaining 25-50% of episodes can be pretty dire; this week saw them talking about gender relations. It was very earnest and well-intentioned, I’ll give them that, but I’m kind of glad I don’t have to listen to undergrad bull sessions any more. If it sounds like an episode is about to turn into this, just skip it – there’ll be another good one along next week! Continue reading “My 2014 Podcasts”

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A Preview of A History of The Future

Two and a half years ago, I began a Kickstarter project for A History of the Future in 100 Objects, a book that would map out the 21st century in a hundred speculative objects. I wanted to cover more than just technology; I wanted to look at the future of religion, politics, sport, food, health, architecture, transport, work, and, well, everything.

That’s quite a tall order, and of course it ended up being far harder than I anticipated; what I thought might take a year took over twice as long. Let’s just say I learned a lot (if you’re interested in hearing more about it, check out my latest Kickstarter update) about how writing a book at the same time as running a company means that you don’t get evenings or weekends any more.

Not that I’d take back the experience. I’m proud of the book. It’s not perfect by any means, but I think that among the hundred chapters that make up the book, from factual articles to newspaper reports to interviews to short stories, there are some new ideas and new expressions of old ideas that many people have never seen before. And that’s all I could ask for.

You can see a preview of A History of the Future right now on the official website, and in fact the eBook is for sale on Amazon and via Gumroad now as well. However, the ‘proper’ launch of the book will be later this month after I talk about it on Radio 4 and at the Futurefest conference, and after it’s available as a physical book — hence why I’m not making too much noise about it.

The energy I poured into the book meant that I didn’t have time to write here. I’m looking forward to coming back, though.

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Thoughts on consistency in tablet news apps

A few months ago, I finally had what I’d been dreaming of for years – digital delivery of every single magazine and newspaper I read. No more stacks of New Yorkers and Economists lingering on tables waiting to be given away (or more likely, recycled); no more hunting for all the bits of subscription forms hiding in The Atlantic. I was free and the iPad did it all. Even better, I discovered that the New Yorker made far more sense as an actual reporting magazine when you received in on time rather than one week ‘late’ in the UK.

Of course, it hasn’t all been perfect. Each magazine has a completely different method of operation and user interface that conspires to frustrate me in big ways and small. Before a recent trip abroad I dutifully opened up every single content app and synced everything, but The Atlantic proved too wily and when I tried to read the magazine while offline, it sniffily informed me that another update was required. Thanks for nothing. It turns out that because the app delivers both web content and magazine content, it’s often confusing whether you’ve actually downloaded the whole magazine or not.

I shall refrain from going too much into The Atlantic app’s failings (powered by Rarewire) as a reading experience; the fact that it delivers magazine pages as images that are just-about-but-not-quite readable without zooming in; the practically non-existent navigation; the weird text-only mode that is missing images (at least when offline). The short story is that it has very little in common with other iPad reading experiences – apart from, presumably, other Rarewire apps – which is more than enough to cause irritation.

The Atlantic 2

The Economist has been cited as one of the best magazine apps out there. I can’t disagree – it’s simple and it works well. I don’t understand why it isn’t on Newsstand yet, since auto-downloading would be nice, but otherwise I can’t complain. It’s worth noting that you have to swipe left to read the next page though, which sort-of makes sense given its two column layout but is nonetheless at odds with many other apps (other The Atlantic, which doesn’t count).

Economist

The New Yorker is an interesting one. It has the usual Conde Nast engine so the download takes forever and frequently hangs (although last week it downloaded itself automatically, which was great). Despite this, I personally think that the New Yorker has one of the best reading experiences out there. The font size and layout is very agreeable and I like the way in which you flick up and down to read through articles. There are plenty of adverts, but it’s easy to skip them and the multiple navigation options allow me to get to where I want to go quickly (i.e. skip the entire first half of the magazine). If only it were faster.

New Yorker 2

The problem with The New Yorker app, though, is that it has all sorts of weird UI quirks. Articles rarely have genuinely interactive elements, and when they do, they behave in all sorts of strange ways. I gather that red links to supplementary material require you to be online, but I wish they were downloaded at the start. I also only realised last month that you could actually tap the ‘buttons’ on the Cartoon Caption competition page to see the nominees and winners; the buttons just don’t look like buttons. I imagine that a lot of other readers have the same problem of just not knowing what the hell is going on. Continue reading “Thoughts on consistency in tablet news apps”

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Slightly outdated thoughts on Siri

I wrote the following piece for the Telegraph a few hours before Steve Jobs’ death was announced, so unsurprisingly, it didn’t go up. And since it’s all about Siri – which is now released – it’s a bit out of date. But I thought you might be interested in seeing it anyway:

This week, the iPhone 5 – sorry, the iPhone 4S – was announced by Apple to millions of anxious fans across the world. Despite containing a significantly faster processor, better antenna, longer battery, higher resolution camera, and more memory and storage space, many were disappointed because it didn’t look any different from the previous model, the iPhone 4 – specifically, because it didn’t have a bigger screen and a thinner body.

I can understand that this may have been a letdown. Over the past few years, we have been accustomed to constant improvements in performance and form-factor among all consumer electronics – not just from Apple, but from all manufacturers like HTC and Samsung and Sony. For better or worse, these devices have taken the same role as jewellery and watches in terms of being status symbols and signs of wealth and taste.

These outward changes, however, can blind us to the remarkable changes in software that are constantly making it easier for a wider number of people to use computing devices. It wasn’t so long ago that to use a computer, you had to master the instructions of a command line in UNIX or DOS; and even more recent versions of Windows and Mac OS have required an understanding of graphical user interfaces that can fox the more timid or cautious user. The touchscreen interfaces of iPhone and Androids, in comparison, are much more intuitive to use – not only do you not need to use a mouse, but the ‘skeuomorphic’ designs they frequently employ which mimic existing physical interfaces (like calculators and address books) help ground us in the familiar.

It’s easy to deride these changes as being mere crutches for those who aren’t smart or quick enough to learn Windows or Mac OS. After all, the very notion of computers and the internet is tied up in most people’s minds as involving scrollbars and mouse pointers and menu items and so on. But the truth is that there are millions of people out there – from infants to the elderly – who are now able to use applications, browse the web, write email, and play games, in a much easier and less frightening way than before.

With its new voice recognition system and Siri, its ‘intelligent assistant’, the iPhone 4S takes matters even further. According to the demonstrations, iPhone 4S users will simply be able to speak “Tell my wife I’m running late” or “Remind me to call the vet” and the phone will be able to send the appropriate text message or to-do item.

Now, this is not the first phone to include voice recognition – the iPhone 3G and 4 have included it, along with numerous Android phones; indeed, Android phones also allow you to dictate text messages and find out what the weather is without any button presses. However, the big difference is that you have to be much more specific in how to speak to those older phones – you can’t be too conversational about it, you need to say something like “weather in London” or “indian restaurants near SW4”.

Any self-respecting geek will not find it at all difficult or unusual to phrase requests in that way; they’re used to writing commands and performing operations that suit the limitations of computers. Normal people, though, don’t actually speak in that way. We don’t say to each other “weather in London?”, we say “What was the weather like down there yesterday?” Yes, it takes longer, but it’s much more natural.

Ultimately it’s the ability of computers to adapt to human habits and limitations rather than vice versa that will determine how useful and widespread computers will be in the future. There’ll always be a place for the command line and the graphic user interface for programmers and scientists and engineers, for whom ambiguity can cost millions and kill lives, but for the rest of us, it will be much easier to be able to speak to computers as we speak to anyone else.

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Things I’m doing

Over the next few months, I’m going to be doing several conferences:

There’d be three more if I weren’t going on holiday to Sudan for a couple of weeks in Oct/Nov. Plus I’m not including two workshops I’m doing with the British Museum about A History of the Future (for kids).

At the games/tech conferences, I’m going to be speaking about some of the new things we’ve been doing with mobiles and in particular, Zombies, Run! At the other conferences, I’m more interested in talking about some new thoughts I’ve had about the change shape of creative work (not terribly original, to be honest, but maybe I can give it a new spin).

So, things are very busy these days between Six to Start and all the extra-curricular stuff I’ve signed myself up to. I’m hoping to break the back of A History of the Future before the year is out (along with Balance of Powers) meaning that next year should be pretty different!

Finally, if you’re wondering why I’m not posting here as much, it’s partly down to the time I’m spending on A History of the Future (22,000 words and counting) and my blogging at the Telegraph. Sorry about that.

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You Have A Lucky Face

I’d been walking back from a meeting in town when it suddenly began raining. I’m the type of person who packs an umbrella even at the slightest possibility of rain – in fact, at school my friends found it amusing how I always seemed to have an umbrella even in the middle of summer.

Lately though, I’d begun relying on a new weather app that provided very reliable hour-by-hour rain predictions to figure out what to wear in the morning – a sort of just-in-time clothing process – and today it told me the probability of rain was very low, hence no umbrella. And so here I was, sheltering underneath an awning waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn green, speaking to a guy who’d just been standing there.

I hadn’t noticed him at first; I was listening to a podcast of This American Life, the one about Father’s Day, and it took a while for me to realise he was actually trying to speak to me. The man was smartly dressed, wearing a dark suit jacket over an open-necked white shirt. He didn’t look like a weirdo, but you never know. I took one earbud out and turned towards him.

“You have a lucky face,” he said.

I laughed. “Thanks,” I said, thinking that he was just in a cheerful mood.

“You have a very lucky face,” he continued. “I can tell from your eyes and your mouth.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“But you look worried, you are frowning here,” he said, gesturing above my nose. “You should know that you will have good luck in the next three months, you will work hard but you will get what you are looking for.”

Ah, I thought, a fortune-teller. I glanced up at the lights; they were still red, and the rain was still coming down.

“Do you want to know why I think this? Let me tell you.” He slipped a red wallet made from leather out of his jacket and pulled out a few small bits of paper and a pen. He scribbed a few words on a scrap of paper, then crumpled it up into a little ball and gave it to me. “Don’t open it yet,” he said.

I took the paper and stuck it in my pocket.

“Okay, now pick a number from 1 to 9.”

Before I went to university, I thought I was interested in genetics and molecular biology. After precisely one lecture, I realised exactly how wrong I was and became determined to switch to something more stimulating, and I eventually found myself taking experimental psychology and neuroscience lectures. Many of them were highly reductionist or focusing on development or pathology, but some were at the cognitive level, and from them and from various textbooks I knew all about how humans reason and how poor we are at understanding logic and probability and causation.

They didn’t teach us specifically about magic, but it was clear that our limited capacity for attention and our ease of being misdirected was really the key to successful magicians. I once saw David Blaine perform a bit of magic at a TED conference. I was standing about one metre away from him when he did a fairly standard card trick on a guy he was close enough to touch, and then at the end gave the guy his watch back. We were all duly impressed; we had all been watching his hands intently, wanting to be the one person who was smart enough to see the trick, to figure out the ending. But he was too good.

“3,” I said, shrugging. He noted it down on a new piece of paper.

“Your favourite colour?”

The lights had turned green. This was the perfect opportunity to escape, but I wanted to see where this was going.

“Blue.” Why not?

“Your age?”

“Uh… 28.”

“How many brothers and sisters?”

“One.”

“Brother or sister?”

“Brother.” He wrote down ‘B – 1’ at the bottom of his list.

“Okay.” He looked up. “And what do you want most? Good health, good life, good fortune, good love, good family?”

I laughed. What an absurd question. “All of them,” I said.

For the first time, he laughed as well. “You have to pick one.”

“Okay then… good family.” He wrote down ‘G – F’.

He asked me for his bit of paper he’d given me at the start. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it over, and he waved it in front of his face at precise points, and gave it back to me. “Don’t open it,” he said again. Then he began talking about how the numbers all added up and how if you combined this and that, I would figure out my fortune.

I was starting to finally get worried. I figured that he’d be asking for money shortly, and things had gone on for long enough that it was already going to be embarrassing when I left. With the lights back to green again, I backed away and said that I had to go now.

“No no no no no, we haven’t finished yet!”

“Sorry,” I said lamely.

“But you haven’t opened the paper!” he protested.

“Sorry,” I repeated behind me.

Befitting my status as a former scientist and being an avid reader of all the science blogs and such, I’m intensely suspicious of superstition. I have no problem with black cats. I deliberately walk underneath ladders. I’m sure I’ve broken at least two mirrors. But walking away from this guy, I couldn’t help but think I’d somehow cursed myself by not letting him finish his shtick; it was surely a rude thing to do, no matter how (eventually) annoying he had become.

Of course, I opened the paper. Written on it was:

3
Blue
0 – 28
B -1
G -F

For about three seconds, I froze.

Firstly, I thought: Wow, could it be true? Did this guy actually figure this out? Have I been completely wrong about all of this my entire life?

Secondly: Obviously not. But what are the chances of him guessing? Still pretty high – certainly not high enough to get a decent hit rate.

Thirdly: Wait a second… he must have done a classic switcheroo while I wasn’t looking! This must be the same bit of paper he’d been writing my answers on, and when he was waving it around, he’d swapped them over.

Aha. I felt proud of myself at this piece of Sherlockian deduction, then slightly sad. It was a tremendously engrossing piece of street magic; certainly not that technically impressive, but no doubt more than good enough to fool the average passerby. I wondered how much money he made by doing this. I wondered what he would have told me next.

And I wondered whether this was his life, giving other people a glimpse ahead into their lives. Giving them a certainty, proven with written evidence and without any caveats or probabilities or qualifications, that things were going to get better. I looked down at the piece of paper again, thought about whether to throw it away or not, and kept on walking.