Saturday, August 13, 2011

Jews go Latin

Last night was a Shabbat Alive night at synagogue, which means we had a musical evening, this time of prayers arranged to famous Latin tunes, such as "Girl From Ipanema," "Cielito Lindo," and the like. It was so much fun! The Torah march was a conga line, or something like one. Too bad I refuse to dance. Even I felt like doing it last night!
Then there was an amazing math-magician, a professor from Harvey Mudd college who performs mathematical magic tricks. Though I have an aversion to math so intense that it gives me a headache just to think about it, it was an incredible performance. The first trick featured an imaginary deck of cards. He told a kid from the audience to pick an imaginary card from the deck and decide what it was. Then he took a real pack of cards from his pocket and told the kid to pick out the one card that was face down. What do you know! It was the 8 of diamonds the kid had imagined!
There were lots of other tricks with enormous squares of random numbers and a baffling "magical squares" trick done with a young girl's birthdate. It ALMOST made me want to try to learn some math... not quite.

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