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In honour of the 3d magic spectacular that we shall be appearing in, on Channel4 on Monday, I thought it would be appropriate to show you some of my favourite optical illusions that play with our sense of three dimensional reality.

First, one of my favourite videos from Marco Tempest, watch out for Marco in the 3d special too!

This drawing by artist Istvan Orosz really bends our perception of depth and space, especially the placement of the subjects’ feet on the stairs.

Inspired by tricks like the one above, this seemingly impossible arrangement of dice from amazing artist/sculptor Shigeo Fukuda confuses us as to what is in front and what is behind.

Fukuda’s sculpture of MC Escher’s “Belvedere” is also breathtaking.

For those of you not familiar with the original drawing click here.

Finally, this optical principal is very clever and shows us that our brain can be easily tricked into assuming the wrong thing.

You can make your own version of this dragon by printing out the template here.

The digital Nostradamus has arrived! My future has been predicted with cold, calculated mathematical certainty. I am going to die on July 1st 2060.

How exactly do I know this? Well, Wolfram Alpha is an online computational knowledge engine that aims to “make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.” It is a search engine that can answer questions based on mathematical, statistical and other stored data.

For example, the average life expectancy for a 27 year old male who lives in the UK is 78.21yrs.

If you add that to my date of birth you get the date July 1st 2060 (which is a Thursday by the way.) The results page worryingly has a clock counting down the years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds to my impending doom.

Obviously this information is purely based on statistical analysis and my life expectancy will actually increase slightly as I get older due to the likelihood of me making it to my next birthday, or “survival probability” as Wolfram so coldly puts it.

Other trivia you can garner from the site includes how popular your name is; I have the 962nd most popular name in the US; there are over 80 unvigintillion different orders a pack of cards be in; you have a 1 in 108290 chance of getting 3 Queens and 2 Jacks when dealt 5 cards; if you roll 4 dice you are most likely to get a total of 14 and I have a less than 0.1% chance of getting 10 heads when I flip a coin ten times (but Wolfram doesn’t know I have a coin with heads on both sides!)

The stuff it can tell you is truly fascinating.

I love everything about it!