Module 4 – Part 2: Steel beams and mem deck machines…
Benji
Steel beams and mem deck machines…
Skyscrapers never used to be that tall.
Well, that’s a lie.
I suppose it depends on what you define as ‘tall.’
The first skyscrapers developed were definitely tall when compared to the buildings people were used to at the time.
But they weren’t, y’know, the huge behemoths we see today.
That was due, in large part, to the structural limitations of their construction techniques.
Now, don’t worry.
I’m not about to get all technical on you. I think it goes without saying that I’m not a qualified architect, and everything I say about this topic is spoken as a ‘hobbyist’
(not sure that’s quite the right phrase, but it’ll do for our purposes.)
That said, my understanding of how Skyscrapers used to be built is this:
The initial way of doing things was using brick and stone. The lower walls would need to be built thick to support the upper, higher walls. But the taller you wanted your building to be, the thicker those walls would need to be, and the more inefficient that fact became.
Then came along new advancements in steel production and use in architecture.
Suddenly, skyscrapers could be built with a simple but rigid ‘steel skeleton’ from the ground up, the walls just hugging the outside of that steel structure.
If you look at this ‘steel skeleton’ structure, you’ll see a couple of key things.
First, this structure is not random. It’s highly structured, organized, and repeated throughout the building.
It also allows the skyscraper to reach incredible heights—in a relatively short space of time.
The one-sentence summary of that might be:
The skyscraper starts on new ground, with a strong foundation, and then is built to incredible heights using this repeatable ‘steel skeleton’ structure in a relatively short space of time.
Now, let’s talk about how that relates to our memorized deck.
Like a skyscraper, we can build a memorized deck from ‘new ground’. For us, this ‘new ground’ is the ‘new deck order’ of a pack of playing cards. Using OUR ‘steel skeleton’, the faro shuffle, we can go from this new deck order to our memorized order. In this sense, the new deck order is almost like a foundation
After all, you wouldn’t be able to build a skyscraper on any old patch of soil—you first need a sufficient foundation. With the memorized deck, you can’t ‘build’ it using the structure we’ll discuss on any old arrangement of the cards—you need the ‘foundation’ of a deck in new deck order.
Fortunately, that’s a fairly easy thing to achieve—just buy a new deck of cards, or arrange your cards into that order beforehand.
Like a skyscraper, we can also reach our memorized order relatively fast when using this ‘steel skeleton’ technique.
But the comparisons don’t end there.
Like the steel skeleton, faro shuffles are highly organized, structured things.
And it’s because of this structure that we can push our memorized deck work to new heights that simply weren’t possible before.
So the one-sentence summary of THAT might be:
The cards start in new deck order, our foundation, and then we build our memorized order using our steel skeleton, the faro shuffle, in a relatively short space of time. We are then able to push our memorized deck to new heights (unlocking more beautiful ‘views’) using this same structure.
Okay, that was two sentences.
But I think you got the idea.
Make sense?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to have it all nailed down technically. As long as you get it ‘in theory’, the rest will become clear as we go through this module (both in writing and via the Live Session.)
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of exactly what the faro is, then we’ll talk about HOW you actually do the faro shuffle (after all, none of this matters much if we can’t actually DO the move)…