The Physics and Physicality of Extreme Juggling | Hacker News Reader

The Physics and Physicality of Extreme Juggling

wired.com

93 pointsColinWright35 comments

I find it a bit amusing that the headline uses the term "Extreme Juggling". Not because it's too clickbaity, but I think the juggling community should have invented that name. "I'm going to an extreme juggling event." sounds much better than the dull "numbers juggling".

On the other hand it wouldn't have done much to make numbers juggling more popular. If we are honest it is a quite disappointing subject to anyone outside the juggling community. Ask some random person what they believe about how many objects an average juggler can keep in air and you will get answers from 10 to 20. The reality looks more like this [1]:

    Balls    People
    3        200M
    4        5M
    5        500K 
    6        50K
    7        10K
    8        1K
    9        200
   10        40
   11        10
   12        2

And these numbers are for throwing and catching just once.

The hard reality of every juggler is just: Do a few simple three ball tricks and people will get excited, show them your five ball routine they will fall asleep.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/juggling/comments/2mfurs/how_many_p...

(3 years old and the top numbers obsoleted by the OP)

> The hard reality of every juggler is just: Do a few simple three ball tricks and people will get excited, show them your five ball routine they will fall asleep.

There is a significant difference between demonstrating a skill, and being entertaining. The best street acts I've seen have been largely trivial with regards the skill level, but phenomenally entertaining because of the way the act was constructed. Numbers juggling is a skill that has effectively zero entertainment value for the non-initiated.

And yet people always ask ask many one can juggle, and if you say "N" they then follow up with "Can you juggle N+1?" I'm always baffled by that, because if you actually do, they really don't care.

The take-away? People are weird, and entertainment beats skill any day.

> I find it a bit amusing that the headline uses the term "Extreme Juggling". Not because it's too clickbaity, but I think the juggling community should have invented that name. "I'm going to an extreme juggling event."

The International Juggler's Association (IJA) has indeed hosted "extreme juggling" since 2006 or so. However, its description indicates it is not strictly an event where the goal is to juggle as many numbers as possible.

> Technical juggling skill has reached an all time high, but the most difficult (and most radical) tricks aren’t performed on stage. What if there was a place to show off these cutting edge tricks? This is a competition where jugglers on the cutting edge can shine.

> https://www.juggle.org/programs/xjuggling/

A google search for "ija extreme juggling" yields lots of entertaining results.

> The hard reality of every juggler is just: Do a few simple three ball tricks and people will get excited, show them your five ball routine they will fall asleep.

I believe others have mentioned this already but there is a lot of daylight between "doing juggling moves" and "doing juggling moves while being simultaneously entertaining". A little showmanship goes a long way, in other words.

> if there was a place to show off these cutting edge tricks? This is a competition where jugglers on the cutting edge can shine. There's the ejc :) http://www.ejc2018.org/

But when it's a trick that only lands 1/10, will you enjoy watching them fail for a while, possibly with a lenghty setup and stay interested in it? I think it's usually the jugglers not showing them because they're not consistent yet.

I'm a little surprised the fall off from 3-4 is four times more than 4-5. After half a year of practice I could sustain a 4-fountain. A couple decades later I think I've still never hit more than 20 catches on a 5-cascade. But I guess if we're talking about flashing 3, that's a pretty low bar.

The rhythm for juggling 3 is fairly straight forward for me. I confess I have not looked at what the equivalent for 4 would be. It seems clearly different in a way that practicing 3 doesn't help get to 4.

Four is genuinely different, but there are now many, many exercises you can do with three which once mastered that makes four almost trivial once mastered.

The same is true with going from four to five, etc.

Have a link to some of these exercises? I'll have to give this another shot. :)

Here are the first few exercises, all for while juggling 3. In all of the following X and Y should be taken as all possible combinations of Left and Right.

* Throw really high from hand X, catch in hand Y, and carry on;

* Throw one from hand X, hold up the ball in hand not(X), catch ball back in hand X and carry on;

* Do that twice in a row with the same hand;

* Do it with the left, then immediately with the right;

* Do it with the right, then immediately the left;

Email me when you've done all those a minimum of 10 times each.

Do you know SiteSwaps?

No link offhand but I recommend mastering 2-in-one-hand juggling (zero in the other) three different ways: columns, clockwise, and anti-clockwise. Learn to do each of those patterns such that you forget which hand was ever dominant to begin with and then you're ready to try 4 throws and catches of 4 balls.

Another good exercise is to juggle 3 balls in the usual fashion (cascade) and make a decision to go directly into juggling 2-in-one-hand and hold the other ball steady. Then resume your cascade and try it again, but this time, use the other hand to juggle 2.

These exercises are fun and give you a sense of accomplishment in and of themselves, but they also really help lay the groundwork for a solid four ball pattern.

When finally learning to juggle 4, some people prefer a synchronous columns(1) pattern or an asynchronous fountain(2) pattern. For the best results, try each until you forget which one you ever had a preference for in the first place.

(1) http://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/4balltricks/FourBallColu...

(2) http://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/4balltricks/Fountain.htm...

> But I guess if we're talking about flashing 3, that's a pretty low bar.

And that is true not just for three. I could flash five well before my 4-fountain was solid but I'm stuck in that state for two decades now.

In the video Barron explains why going from odd to even is always easier than going from even to odd.

Personally, I always found odd numbers easier, once I got past 5. But I never got past doing seven, failing eight, and having a shot at nine, so I'm not in the same territory.

Here's a video of Alex juggling 14 balls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK6AlhTjUbY

Even disregarding the terrible production values (black balls on a dark grey background?), as an uninitiated spectator it's hard to muster up a more enthusiastic reaction than "...huh."

Lots of music is 'musicians music'. It won't entertain people who aren't musicians, but for musicians it is very entertaining because they are able to appreciate the skill as well as the music. Numbers juggling is similar, it entertains other jugglers.

It’s the same for any “high-technique” thing, really.

I’m into pixel art, or at least I used to be. I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing it, and I’m still not all that good, but I’m at least familiar with all the techniques. It’s a painstaking, time-consuming, and challenging medium—the best pixel artists in the world may spend hundreds of hours on a single piece that isn’t even terribly large—a few hundred pixels to an edge.

If I look at their work, I’m blown away by the mastery of it and can spend ages examining it up close, because I know what to look for—detail work, palette optimisation, creative use of constraints, advanced colour theory, use of optical illusions to create form and texture, and execution of basic things like removing jaggies, antialiasing, and dithering.

It piques the nostalgia of people who are into that style of artwork from games they grew up with, but by and large, pixel art is for pixel artists. Someone who isn’t familiar with how difficult it is will look at the same piece and go “Huh, neat. Kinda pixelated though.”

(Or worse, they’ll judge amateur work—often not even strictly pixel art because it wasn’t done by hand—better than a masterpiece.)

There’s an interesting surprise: the Shannon Juggling Theory.

> By building on the juggling theory of Claude Shannon (yes, that Claude Shannon—the father of information theory was also an avid juggler), Kalvan's studies detail the ways that juggling more balls requires a simultaneous increase in the height, frequency, and precision of one's throws.

I guess he saw vertical space as channel capacity

LOL, but I bet you’re right!

I was just thinking about the relationship between gravity, and throwing & catching juggling balls vs. the weight of the balls. The apex height & number of balls determines the juggling frequency. Or, a frequency & number of balls determines the height. Fix any two, the third falls out.

Some important constraints are that holding a weight in your hand reduces your acceleration, and that at a fixed juggling frequency, doubling the number of balls requires a 4x increase in the apex height. (Shannon might say that channel capacity is proportional to the square root of apex height at a given juggling frequency).

In the video, Kalvan measures Barron shaking his arms twice as fast (without holding any weight), but appears to jump to the conclusion that it means he might be able to juggle twice as many balls. They speculate that accuracy might be the reason that Barron doesn’t achieve his physical potential. But since the weight of the balls slows down the max juggling frequency, and since adding more balls means throwing quadratically higher, Barron could be right, that it may require more strength than he has.

A teacher told us that in the 80s they used sat links as memory.. a bit like delay line memories, but in atmosphere. Quite mindblowing for my college me.

EME has been used like this as well.

> EME

electromagnetic energy ?

Earth-Moon-Earth, sorry, jargon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...

yeah, you're excused, because the idea is so funky I'm too excited to bother :)

If that excites you how about this: Sending data into space with an omnidirectional antenna will sooner or later return the signal back to earth. That would be pretty long term storage and the access times would be horrible but it's an interesting idea. Hm, someone should do this with that scientific papers archive :)

No thread about juggling should be without a link to Anthony Gatto's story:

http://grantland.com/features/anthony-gatto-juggling-cirque-...

Previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671214

Tangent, but just wanted to thank you, Colin, for piquing my interest in Maths at a talk you held when I was at school. It was maybe a decade ago now, but putting 2 and 2 together and seeing you on HN is a very surreal thing indeed!

Very kind - thank you. Feel free to email me to get/be/stay in touch, and to let me know what you're doing.

I loved your appearance on Numberphile :)

Wow - thank you! That video should get to 200K views by the end of the year - fingers crossed. Not as many as other Numberphile videos, but pretty good. It was disappointing that it got basically zero reaction here on HN, but <fx: shrug />

I might submit it again ... it has been eight months.

Extreme juggling makes me think of https://youtu.be/hFP4C0PQ4jU

It's a very strange sport. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_(juggling)

o_o

Pro tip: if you do a juggling trick and then your audience asks "How many was that?" You should always add at least two to the actual number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com