Mysterious Stranger

Mysterious Stranger
	Front cover
Author	David Blaine
Country	United States
Language	English
Published	October 29, 2002
Media type	Print
ISBN	978-0375505737
OCLC	49925771
Dewey Decimal	793.8
LC Class	GV1547 .B646 2002

Mysterious Stranger: A Book of Magic by street magician David Blaine was published on October 29, 2002 by Random House. Part autobiography, part history, and part armchair treasure hunt, the book also includes instructions on how to perform basic card tricks and illusions.[1]

Synopsis

The book has been divided into 12 chapters— For Those Who Believe, Discovery of Magic, The Three Magi, Secrets of Cards, Confidence, Playing the Part of a Magician, The Man Ain't Right, Primitive Mysteries, Ehrich Weiss, The Premature Burial, Frozen in Time², Vertigo.

In the chapter, "Discovery of Magic", Blaine tells stories of his childhood, of how he became interested in magic, and of his devotion to his late mother.

In "The Three Magi", he acknowledges Robert-Houdin, Max Malini and Alexander Herrmann as major influences; in "Confidence", he cites Orson Welles and Titanic Thompson as inspiration for his street magic persona; and in "Ehrich Weiss", he celebrates the man we know as Houdini.

In "The Man Ain't Right", Blaine describes the evolution of his street magic act and how a masterfully timed card trick cinched his television deal with ABC.

In "Premature Burial", "Frozen in Time", and "Vertigo", Blaine details his grueling regime in preparation for each of his stunts of endurance, respectively, being buried in a glass coffin for seven days, standing inside a block of ice for sixty-one hours, and standing atop a 100-foot pole in high winds for thirty-five hours.

In addition, scattered throughout the book are clues to Blaine's $100,000 Challenge, an armchair treasure hunt of visual ciphers and logic deduction devised by game designer Cliff Johnson, creator of The Fool's Errand. The Challenge was solved by Sherri Skanes on March 20, 2004, 16 months after the book's publication.

gollark: If you do *not* use that, then people can store a bunch of precalculated mappings from hashes to original passwords (rainbow tables, yes) and work out the original.

gollark: That's why salts are recommended (they're a bit of extra data you store along with the password and feed to the hash function when hashing it in the first place and comparing passwords with the hash).

gollark: The main attack on this is that you can, sometimes even using dedicated ASICs/FPGAs, run hashes *very fast* on a lot of possibilities and figure out what the original password was.

gollark: Yep!

gollark: The point is that for one hashed input you always have the same output, so you can compare values without storing what they originally were.

References

Jennifer Bromann-Bender (20 December 2013). Booktalking Nonfiction: 200 Surefire Winners for Middle and High School Readers. Scarecrow Press. pp. 113–. ISBN 978-0-8108-8809-8.

Treasure Hunt reference

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[Bromann-Bender2013-1] Jennifer Bromann-Bender (20 December 2013). Booktalking Nonfiction: 200 Surefire Winners for Middle and High School Readers. Scarecrow Press. pp. 113–. ISBN 978-0-8108-8809-8.