“if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything”

My best mate had a card trick where he would just pull a random card from the deck and say "Is this your card?"

I love that this is basically comedy with a captive audience

Matt doesn't need to do his entire homeopathic rant, just a:10,000 of it is just as effective.

From snopes: "Q33NY was not the flight or tail number of either of the planes that were crashed into the World Trade Center that day". Just goes to prove the whole point of Matt's talk. Wingdings is a big data set, so if you type in random numbers & letters, you're bound to find patterns.

It's the GREEN NEEDLE / BRAIN STORM audio thing that astounds me. Proof that we can hear whatever our eyes tell us to hear.

I once shared a club lottery by using Fibonacci numbers with someone who had never heard of them but happened to pick the same numbers.

I wish my employer understood the measurements they come up with to rate performance of employees. I literally have measurements that are mathematically impossible to make and they constantly change to other numbers I cannot do. A lot of it are percentages. I tried explaining it mathematically and they just say “try harder.” Essentially it’s like I’m shooting free throws in a basketball game and I have two shots. My manager says all we need is for you to make three.

Is that the real Matt? Talking all imperial? I'll have to take that as evidence of extraterrestrial interference.

My favorite backmasked song is "Fire On High" by the Electric Light Orchestra. To poke fun at people searching for these patterns in random noise, they genuinely did start the song with a reversed section of speech. When played normally of course, it is unintelligible noise, but when played backwards, it says "The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back, turn back."

My wife and I like to do cryptic crossword puzzles. It’s amazing how often simply knowing the other has solved a clue triggers the solution becoming clue to us.

This is brilliant. Every journalist and every scientist needs to watch this, and watch it again every month or so.

Was this filmed using Matt's 10,000 Domino Computer?

It's interesting: it's counterintuitive that the answer to the birthday problem is so low when the problem is presented in the abstract, but when you're actually watching a group of people list off their birthdays, I found myself intuitively surprised that nobody had heard their birthday yet.

This talk is more important now than ever.

The conclusion of this talk is so important!