Originally published at: Excavator operators showing ninja-level tricks and feats of precision | Boing Boing
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Most of that is probably real (and I’ve seen operators do many of those, so they aren’t unreasonable)… however… there is a lot of suspicious editing in that video. Weird cuts, footage being tempo-shifted or reversed, etc.
Enjoy, but with a pinch of salt.
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We could use these people! I currently have an excavator parked in the middle of my farm pond. I doubted my own skills with the tractor enough that we outsourced. Guy got halfway in and then moved the wrong pile of muck and found himself surrounded and sunk. He did this yesterday while I was at work and never bothered texting to explain it…or to ask me to haul him out. I just pieced it together with my own Farm CSI skills when I got home and saw it abandoned. I’m still waiting for a text.
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Very unusual, and lovely, choice of music.
(Not having ever used an excavator) I think a lot of what makes this particular sort of manipulation feel so impressive is that it’s counter to how we all know muscles work. When people ask me (a 7-ball juggler, or more often 6 nowadays) what really makes juggling 9+ balls so hard, I ask them to picture writing their name with a pen vs. writing their name with a table. They all get it, without having to do the experiment.
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I agree about the music. I wonder what it is? Probably generic copyright-free filler, but still nice.
Well this is deuced odd. Shazam directs me to “Come Feel the Love - Sunhatch”, which it is not. There one finds the YouTube comments “Shazam brought me here. It was wrong btw” and “Should have been East Freaks - Leave It!” which is also wrong.
Spider excavators have countless ways for the operator to get in trouble.
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I don’t understand your analogy at all. Are 9 balls an order of magnitude heavier? Are 9 balls meter scale instead of cm scale? Does writing your name with a table require tracking 28% more objects?
No, it’s that to juggle 9 balls at the same rate as 5 (say) requires putting them 4 times as high, so 4 times the strength every ball. (For m-throws vs. n-throws the height ratio is ((m-1)/(n-1))^2, where the 1s very accurately account for the time the balls spend in hands.)
Here’s a fairly direct comparison, based on juggling records from 2000 or so (I haven’t kept up with things). At the time the record for 7 balls in the air was ~3 minutes. There’s another way to juggle 7, though, which is to use very very bouncy balls (~90% coefficient of restitution) and deal with the ball only near its highest point, rather than its lowest point. It’s a lot more cramped and prone to disastrous cascading collisiions. Nonetheless the record for bouncing 7 was 20min, and I watched the as the guy broke 20min and said “That’s enough” being too bored to continue.
Hm. This guy thinks he has the record at 19m30s. I’ll be sorry to break it to him.
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That’s great, thanks for the explanation.
I had never considered the physics of juggling. Fun classic internet page for anyone else interested.
Makes more sense than pens and tables.
My uncle could take the top off a boiled egg with the teeth of a JCB bucket.
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Neil Parish just exploded
If he’s left an excavator in your pond, after how long can you just claim it as your own?
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I’ve yet to give in and text him to ask how the dig is going and no word from him. I don’t want to be mean but I’ve got questions! One of which is the amount of time I wait before hooking up my tractor and dry docking my own slightly used Caterpillar!
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