PickVidsBest Magic, puzzles & curiosities Videos
The 34 Magic, puzzles & curiosities videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 1 introductory, 0 intermediate, 33 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a demo. What they share is that you see the result first and only then decide whether to follow the detail. Channels you will keep seeing include OK Go, Mark Rober, Numberphile.
The man with 1,000 Klein Bottles UNDER his house - Numberphile
Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house.
Dani DaOrtiz at Fool US 2022 (the act that Penn and Teller didn’t even try to figure out.)
A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022.
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine - Official Video
OK Go's music video for This Too Shall Pass, featuring a huge Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse in Los Angeles with Syyn Labs.
Lars Andersen: A new level of archery
Archer Lars Andersen demonstrates fast, accurate shooting techniques he says he revived from historical art and texts, arguing Hollywood archery is not historical.
[1299] Unpickable Locks From Stuff Made Here
The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel.
Virtual Barber Shop (Audio...use headphones, close ur eyes)
A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head.
Derren Brown - The System (Full)
Derren Brown's TV special in which he convinces a person he has a system for predicting horse race winners, demonstrating how survivorship bias and selective outcomes can fake predictive powers.
Math Encounters -- Five Balls, Two Hands: The Patterns of Juggling -- Colin Wright (Presentation)
Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns.
Kostya Kimlat Fools Penn & Teller // Fool Us: Penn's Favorite Card Trick
Magician Kostya Kimlat performs a card trick on Penn & Teller: Fool Us that fooled the duo, using Penn's favorite card trick as a basis.
selective attention test
The original invisible gorilla awareness test by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, in which viewers count basketball passes and often miss a gorilla crossing the scene.
Ricky Jay - Amazing Card Trick/Manipulation
A three-minute clip of magician Ricky Jay performing a card manipulation routine, including table faro shuffles.
Speaking Piano - Now with (somewhat decent) captions!
A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum.
Pranks Destroy Scam Callers- GlitterBomb Payback
Mark Rober and collaborators build glitter bomb traps and other pranks to fight phone scam call centers, and share evidence about the operations.
Geographical limit between Balkan and Central Europe
A one-minute clip of Slavoj Zizek showing what he calls the official geographical limit between the Balkans and Central Europe, standing at a river in Ljubljana.
Quick-sort with Hungarian (Küküllőmenti legényes) folk dance
Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music.
Machine with Concrete - Arthur Ganson
Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture chains twelve 1:50 worm gear reductions so the final gear, embedded in concrete, would take over two trillion years to turn once.
Try this bizarre audio illusion! 👁️👂😮 - BBC
A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see.
Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)
Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.
OK Go - Needing/Getting - Official Video
OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.
Math Magic
Vsauce explores math through card tricks and big numbers, including an animation of how enormous 52 factorial, the number of deck orderings, really is.
Best Lenny call ever! "I got to hang up. I cain't do this no longer. No, sir." (14:04)
A recorded phone call in which the Lenny bot, a looping set of prerecorded replies from a rambling old man, keeps a telemarketer on the line for 14 minutes.
McGurk effect - Auditory Illusion - BBC Horizon Clip
A two-minute BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where what you see of a speaker's mouth changes the sound you hear.
AMAZING VIDEO! Man Lifts 20 Ton Block By Hand?
A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers.
strandbeest evolution
Theo Jansen shows many of his Strandbeests, wind-powered walking kinetic sculptures, set to Khachaturian's Spartacus.