Yes, Steve Martin is a major Patron Of The Arts and has kept that part (and most other parts) separate from his film carreer.
One of the things that I most enjoyed about the Science Fantasy "Matrix" series was that everyone's superpowers came from cheat codes.
Real life magic (stage, cult and otherwise) actually involves the manipulation of the observer and the observations rather than, as in science, the observations and the observed objects. It involves a detailed knowledge of about how most of us just get the Reader's Digest condensed summary of what's impinging upon our sensory apparatus. If you can present yourself as something that the compression system tends to handle badly (noisy compression) then you can be invisible. There's a species of spider that vibrates into vertabrate invisibility to deal with spider eating birds; but sadly cannot fool all of the eyes all of the time of Praying Manti or wasps. If you can present some small nugget of scenery that is usually decompressed into a something much bigger then you can generate all sorts of illusions. The human nervous system has all sorts of scanning and internal data transfer frequencies that can be sync'ed with or exceeded for all sorts of special effects. Indeed, Magic Lanterns of all sorts depend on the scanning ratio of your visual cortex.
Then there's the separate issue of Scientific thinking versus Magical Thinking. I like the stories where people apply proper scientific methodology to their magical universe where the magic works on the things as well as the people. Haven't seen much in fiction of the other way around although the newspapers are, often to horrific effect, full of it.
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Magicy, Whagicy stuff
Date: 2015-10-15 03:32 am (UTC)From:One of the things that I most enjoyed about the Science Fantasy "Matrix" series was that everyone's superpowers came from cheat codes.
Real life magic (stage, cult and otherwise) actually involves the manipulation of the observer and the observations rather than, as in science, the observations and the observed objects. It involves a detailed knowledge of about how most of us just get the Reader's Digest condensed summary of what's impinging upon our sensory apparatus. If you can present yourself as something that the compression system tends to handle badly (noisy compression) then you can be invisible. There's a species of spider that vibrates into vertabrate invisibility to deal with spider eating birds; but sadly cannot fool all of the eyes all of the time of Praying Manti or wasps. If you can present some small nugget of scenery that is usually decompressed into a something much bigger then you can generate all sorts of illusions. The human nervous system has all sorts of scanning and internal data transfer frequencies that can be sync'ed with or exceeded for all sorts of special effects. Indeed, Magic Lanterns of all sorts depend on the scanning ratio of your visual cortex.
Then there's the separate issue of Scientific thinking versus Magical Thinking. I like the stories where people apply proper scientific methodology to their magical universe where the magic works on the things as well as the people. Haven't seen much in fiction of the other way around although the newspapers are, often to horrific effect, full of it.