Comment by thom 13 hours ago
Juggling is one of hobbies with the highest ratios of being able to impress random people versus the actual effort you have to put in, and I generally find I never forget 3-ball stuff I learned as a kid. It's also as good as a long walk for getting you out of your head when needed.
Shout out to anyone that remembers the Mushy Pea juggling shop in Manchester many years ago, where I learned all sorts of circus skills.
It’s also fun that you can tweak it without the layperson even noticing the change in relative difficulty.
Cascade pattern = easy difficulty
Shower pattern = normal difficulty
Box pattern = hard difficulty
For those wondering: to juggle 4 balls, you either have to decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is in the air.
Unless you start throwing feathers or balloons, the latter requires you throw higher. That requires you to either spend more time launching them up (bad for the ‘decrease time between catching and throwing’) or use more force (bad for throwing accuracy.
Also, even assuming you juggle 4 balls keeping “time in hand” equal, you have to throw it higher by a factor of (4/3)². That’s almost 2.
And even if you manage to make those throws with the same accuracy in angles, the errors in location by the time you catch the balls scale by the same factor.
> you either have to decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is in the air
I think you might be thinking of 5 ball juggling.
4 ball juggling (or at least it's most common variant, "The Fountain" [0]) is fascinating because it's really juggling two balls in each hand in a way that makes it appear similar to the standard cascade. Though this may sound "less hard" than what people initially imagine, it's a very different feeling than all the basics you learn using only 3 balls.
They're not wrong. Assuming alternating hands are doing the throwing (rather than both hands throwing a ball simultaneously), 4-ball patterns mean each ball is in the air for 4 beats, while 3-ball patterns only take 3 beats each.
And once one realises that many juggling patterns can be understood by the number of beats each ball takes to return to a hand, one can then think in siteswap (https://juggle.fandom.com/wiki/Siteswap).
Also, with a three ball pattern, most of the time there's only a single ball in the air. With four, there are almost always two. The odds of a mid-air collision increase significantly, and go up as the number of balls increases.
That also forces you to have much more consistent throws which, as you note, gets harder because you also have to throw higher which scales up any error in the force you're applying.
Don't forget about fire. Even the most boring of moves amaze crowds when half your equipment is burning.
Rubik's cubing is another. Most people here with enough logical aptitude to be programmers could probably learn a beginner method in a day or two. I'll pick up a cube anywhere I see one scrambled, solve it in a couple minutes, and then the last flourish is to leave it in the checkerboard pattern.
I also juggle, and the result of the combination is that approximately every single person on Facebook has posted to me the video about solving cubes while juggling them...
The biggest difference about Rubik's cubing is that once you have mastered 3x3x3, 4x4x4, and 5x5x5 (which is just a slight variant on 3x3x3) all subsequent cubes are just natural extensions of these. A 17x17x17 requires no new skills that aren't already mastered in a 5x5x5, it just takes more time. The nice part of about this is you can really blow peoples minds by pulling out an 11x11x11 cube and solving it at though it were nothing.
Even sided cubes are the hardest because they have issues with "parity" that are only uncovered near the end of the solve and can be quite tedious to fix (at least imho).
Right, cubing scales up much more readily than juggling. Although I've found the bigger cubes aren't quite so impressive because you can't do them as fast. I take 10-15 minutes for the 5x5x5, and by then any observer has lost interest.
But yeah, some people will be impressed just because it's bigger. They always say that it must be super hard. My stock reply: "It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Is 1000 piece harder than 500? Not really harder, it's just more of the same thing." Sometimes that gets a blank look, sometimes that induces enlightenment.
My favorite cuboid variant is a 3x3x4. That blows people's minds when they see it's not symmetric, and they handle it and realize that it can't do certain turns (the long axes have to be 180° not 90°), but in fact that limitation makes it easier and I can solve it almost as fast as a 3x3x3.
Juggling 3 is a skill that is way easier than people think until they do it. But the very next question is will be, "how many can you juggle?" as they apparently think juggling 4 is just 33% more difficult than 3.