It sounds fantastical enough to have been created by Terry Pratchett or J.K. Rowling, but the Conjuring Arts Research Center is very much real, and one of the world's greatest collections of books dedicated to the deceptive arts.
Conjuring Arts may be hard to find, but it is located in the heart of New York's magic community. A few blocks northeast is Tannen's, the oldest operating magic shop in the city, and a few blocks to the west is Fantasma, a magic store home to the largest Houdini museum in the world. One of the people on the Center's Board of Directors is Brooklyn-born magician David Blaine.
The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, "dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts." It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location.
[...] But these magic books aren't just secreted away. Above all, the Conjuring Arts Research Center was set up to be a practical resource. "I wanted a place that was available for anyone with an appointment, to be able to come in and find some of the rarest material," says Kalush. A large part of the organization's work is sourcing these forgotten treasures, preserving them, and making them available to magicians and scholars.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @01:22PM (5 children)
If computer science is an art, and we learn in SICP that we "conjure" the "spirits" of the computer with spells... then computer science must actually be a deceptive art!
I mean, who are we truly kidding here...? It isn't even really about computers OR science!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @02:51PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq4DGqx5nqI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:14PM (2 children)
I don't know. The other day I finally gave in and wielded the flame of Udûn, told an http-equiv meta tag that was causing a major problem with some proprietary crap software that's unfortunately our mission-critical package to go back to the Shadow, and finally proclaimed that it could not pass. Fortunately, it slinked away so I didn't have to battle it to the death and remort as Tsubasa the White, so I remain Tsubasa the Kurenai. Unfortunately, it only worked insofar as the static page a co-worker had set up we needed to display in that software package.
I mean, computers are sufficiently advanced technology and thus indistinguishable from magick, so why not? And my goddess, I truly don't understand what people find sufficiently advanced about it, but that's the way they find it. Perhaps here we should review a certain episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos [imdb.com], wherein we follow Johannes Kepler from his attempts to combine mysticism with early astronomical sciences, to his unease in the court of Tycho Brahe, to his even greater unease in considering a shape that was not a circle for the orbits of the plants, to finally having the courage to admit that perhaps mysticism is wrong: the orbits of the planets are ellipses, an unholy and subverted geometric figure. This is something that most people are unable to do as concerns both the heavens and computers.
What kind of magic are we talking about here? Is this the kind of magic that Penn and Teller had a show about, or are we talking about religious traditions? I see a mention of Houdini. I suppose I will have to break tradition and RTFA.
Ok, psychic phenomenon (there's only 1? should that be phenomena?) is getting into the religious unless taken in the context of the rest of the list. It sounds like instead we're talking about Penn and Teller, so we should read “psychic” as a hypnotic technique whereby the performer utilizes vagueness and the human mind's propensity to find meaning where there is none.
That's a relief. For a moment there, I was afraid this was part of the greater victory feminism has won in changing trans folks from the odd disease-ridden prostitute such as the sweet transvestite in the coffee shop scene in Miracle Mile [imdb.com], who symbolizes man's sinful nature that leads him to senseless nuclear war, to a violent threat against every womyn-born-womyn, lurking in every bathroom. The Pagan religions, especially Wicca, are some of the most transphobic religions I know. They go even further in invoking gender essentialism* than Christianity (and I assume Islam and Judaism). Instead of in the context of the creations of an unknowable god, Wicca invokes gender essentialism in the context of maleness and femaleness as ineffable cosmic constants.
As with all religions, we see the ease with which lowly humans can subvert (and rape) the divine by daring to question the gender dichotomy feminism and the religions have embraced so dearly. When they consider cases of body parts other than the brain exhibiting inter-sex properties, the doublethink is astounding.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism#Gender_essentialism_and_exclusion_in_feminist_theory [wikipedia.org]
BUT! Since we're talking about the art of illusions, which I find fascinating but unfortunately have no aptitude for, that would be an off-topic rant were I to continue it.
I still can't help but to think it's all related. Magickal thinking, in addition to fear, is a mind killer. Magickal thinking is always victorious over civilizations and empires. The scientific institutions are always ransacked. The hegemonies of old are always restored, and a millennium (or at least a very long time) of dark ages always follows. Ishtar once held her torch high [wikipedia.org]. That civilization collapsed. So they built another one and gave Ishtar a new name. That civilization collapsed. So they built another one and gave Ishtar another new name. I believe there's a statue of Ishtar holding her torch high [wikipedia.org] on an island also given her new name. That civilization collapsed.
An endless cycle of death and rebirth. It could all just be a futile exercise.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:47PM
I haven't seen the original Cosmos in many years, but this is rather inaccurate. It implies that Kepler abandoned "mysticism" when he discovered ellipses fit the data better. But that's simply not true. If anything, mysticism of a sort inspired him to broaden his search for "heavenly harmony," and he found ways to model the elliptical orbits within his old mystical framework, particularly using musical and harmonic proportions to match up with orbital characteristics of each planet. Prior to Kepler, the "harmony of the spheres" was largely an abstract philosophical metaphor -- but Kepler sought to show the musical proportions directly in the heavens [wikipedia.org]. And even in his final works, Kepler viewed his mathematical "laws" as merely that: a mathematical model. But the true order, so he'd repeat over and over, resided in the musical proportions that he claimed he had found (even if they were really only an approximate fit, from a modern science perspective).
Circular orbits were considered the norm, and it was hard for other scientists of the time to abandon them. Galileo for example, despite reading of Kepler's empirical data, refused to accept elliptical orbits -- arguing in favor of the Copernican circular orbits that still required lots of epicycles. For Galileo, though, it wasn't really "mysticism" of perfect circles: it was an idea that was attached to the alternative physics of celestial matter that had been promoted since Aristotle (and likely before). Celestial matter wasn't supposed to operate on the same principles as terrestrial matter (e.g., which tended to come to "rest"). The planets used circles because they were supposedly set in motion at the beginning of time and would travel forever that way. Proposing that they are ellipses requires an explanation about WHY they deviate from a more "perfect" motion, despite being composed of celestial matter. That explanation (at least a rigorous one) really wouldn't come along until Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which itself was modeled on "mystical" unseen forces associated with alchemy and such.
Since Kepler didn't yet understand the law of inertia and how it could ultimately create a unified theory of terrestrial and celestial matter, Kepler was required to find an alternative justification for his elliptical system, which he mostly found in a theory of musical proportions as applied to the planets (along with some other speculative geometry), something that seems rather bizarre and "mystical" to modern scientists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:24PM
Are you implying that Ishtar can be held responsible for USAs foreign policy? Even if we take for granted that there are razor-sharp talons behind the veil, and lots of tentacles and ever-changing machine parts, that whisper in that terrible voice, of a love worse then hate... On the inside, i believe she's basically your normal allpowerful omniscient deity, outside the time and space. Not some kind of horrible bloodthirsty monster like those in USA government!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:28PM
And Creative Commons licensing of the resulting digital duplicates of the original books?
It obviously might need more involvement than that if the pages were bleached and rewritten, or had hidden text in the margins or what have you (all possibilities if they are genuine (stage?) magic books dating back up to hundreds of years.) The key point however though is that many of these resources may be impossible to replace, and leaving them all in the same place, unduplicated, means there is the potential for loss of information.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:32PM
I find it extremely unsettling for anyone to compare the creations of Terry Pratchett with those of JK Rowling. I love them both, but they are fundamentally different in my head.
For instance there's something that's stuck in my head: JK Rowling is the best sold author in the UK, T Pratchett is the most shop-lifted. I don't know why, but it feels like this is a battle that Terry won.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 11 2017, @02:02AM
... but I was never dextrous enough to make coins and cards disappear.
Even so I put on a magic show for my whole school when I was in the sixth grade. The tricks were really quite amateurish, but at the end of the show I challenged three of the biggest, toughest boys to tie me up in a fifty foot rope, then escaped in under a minute.
Here's a tip: if you want to tie someone up so they cannot escape, don't use a long rope. Use a short rope.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]