As he turned away from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five — a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends — fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days — wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It’s likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before — for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess — he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.
That is from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Here is my previous post on the book, which I recommend highly.
Yesterday I was reading Hamming’s fantastic “You and Your Research”; it mentioned Shannon a few times…
> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
> Shannon, I believe, ruined himself. In fact when he left Bell Labs, I said, “That’s the end of Shannon’s scientific career.” I received a lot of flak from my friends who said that Shannon was just as smart as ever. I said, “Yes, he’ll be just as smart, but that’s the end of his scientific career,” and I truly believe it was.
And so he took up juggling.
Shannon juggled during and after his career at Bell Labs. Shannon’s juggling theorem was the only thing formulated afterwards.
Juggling at a high level and doing something else at a high level are far from being mutually exclusive.
I thought I’d just *throw* that out there before someone makes an incorrect jump in logic.
As a point of logic, your point is valid, but if Malcolm Gladwell famous assertion is correct (a big “if”) that it requires about 10,000 hours of one’s time to do x activity at a high level, then 10,000 hours worth of “juggling” or any other activity, by definition, must reduce the number of hours one may devote to another activity, since time is a finite resource.
A “high level” of juggling includes multiple fiery batons, multiple sharp objects of differing size and shape such as a machete, a hatchet, and a French chef’s knife together, and multiple objects of differing size and weight, such as an egg, an orange, a grapefruit, and a watermelon together.
It’s a long way from being a competent dilletante to doing it at a “high level.”
This will probably bore all of you, but for the sake of Jason Garfield’s temper I will try to throw a little juggling education out there.
1. Juggling torches and knives and other such things are cheap tricks that are no more difficult to learn than how to juggle clubs (a common prop). The fire is not that dangerous as long as you are not wearing flammable clothes and knives are dulled (just because you see them cut paper does not mean they are sharp). They are just tricks used because most people will be more impressed by such things than tricks that are technically difficult.
2. My snobbish brother says that the only real jugglers are those that can juggle five or more objects. That said, it is not true that juggling five balls makes you a great juggler. Even in the good old days before advent of sport juggling nobody was famous for just juggling five balls. But there is a qualitative difference that takes place once you start to juggle five balls. That is when you have to develop a pattern and you are not just throwing up the balls. The main reason for why juggling five objects is qualitatively different than 3 or 4. It is the first pattern where you have to have more balls in the air than you have in your hands. But the laws of gravity also come into play.
3. Most people’s eye witness accounts is not a very good guide to what a juggler is doing. People who watch me juggle four balls almost always think that all four balls are going through both hands. In reality, I am juggling two balls in each hand. But a lot of people have trouble believing that until I break down the steps for them.
You can see for yourself how bad your perception of difficulty is by watching Jason Garfield diss of Chris Bliss juggling routine http://youtu.be/QYUXaYCkv-A (every trick a five ball trick) and watch Chris Bliss routine http://youtu.be/uNss0KZr9dc (every trick a 3 ball trick). Jason’s routine is orders of magnitude harder than Chris’s. But most people don’t see an appreciable difference except that Chris Bliss makes more facial expressions.
After opening this can of worms, I guess I’ll respond somewhat to this thread, though mainly at ape man who seems to be the only juggler besides myself to chime in.
ape man,
I agree with your first point.
I am not snobbish like your brother; I think that juggling 3 balls is “real” juggling, but I agree that 5 is a different league altogether.
I am sad to hear that most people think the second video is comparable to the first. The first rocks, and makes hard stuff look easy, while the second video makes (mostly) easy stuff look hard.
I’m a self taught purely amateur (i.e. not for money) juggler, and yes I am happy. My current skills are a shadow of what they were a couple of decades ago, notably pre worldwide web. Everything I learned came from my own trial and error combined with what I could figure out from watching the occasional street performer outside Faneuil Hall in Boston.
My somewhat unorthodox learning process was as follows, noting that if there are “proper” names for different routines I don’t know them, or at least I don’t think I do:
I started out (again, I was my own teacher) juggling 2 balls in my right hand (I’m a righty) perpendicular to my body, i.e. throwing them back towards my body. I then learned to do the same with my left hand.
After mastering that, I accidentally taught myself to juggle 3 balls (used to be tennis balls in that day, but quickly upgraded to lacrosse balls which bounced out of my hands less!). I would juggle 2 in my right hand, then without stopping would transfer to juggling those 2 balls in my left hand. Then I would be juggling 2 in my left hand, and without stopping would again transfer hands, back to my right hand. I then had a non-brilliant epiphany, and realized that if I just added a third ball, I could go from transferring from 2 ball juggling between hands, with a pause for a beat, to juggling 3 balls with two hands.
That 3 ball routine was itself unorthodox. I juggled all 3 in a straight line perpendicular to my body, just like I did with 2 balls (i.e. throwing them from farther out from my body towards my body, all in a straight line towards my body); I didn’t know better. I later learned that this isn’t the easiest thing for other 3-ball jugglers to learn how to do.
After learning that, I taught myself other routines for 2 balls in one hand juggling: circular parallel to my body, both clockwise and counter clockwise, as well as straight up and down (in different lines for both balls). The latter turned out to be great for learning “the T” with 3 balls in two hands, or at least that’s what I heard it referred to as. The former was helpful (in my opinion) in learning how to do 3 or more balls in a circular pattern, both clockwise and counterclockwise.
After that I occasionally ran into other amateur jugglers, and I realized that they were juggling criss-cross underhanded, parallel to their bodies, which was easy enough to teach myself. I also then taught myself criss-cross juggling, but juggling from the outside in, instead of inside out.
Most other all-ball patterns were learned through painful trial and error trying to replicate the semi-professional (i.e. money-wise they were semi-pro, but skill-wise they were accomplished in their routines) street jugglers I occasionally saw.
I learned “the claw” (again, maybe only my term?), which is basically overhand juggling (i.e. throwing with the palm on top of the ball, and catching overhanded as well). I learned to do that mostly in front of me, as well as above me (palms are less on top of the ball and more perpendicular-ish to the ground on throws and maybe catches too).
I learned something hard to explain, but here goes all of the above are 3 balls (so far), including this routine: Throw using right hand under the left arm on the left side of the body, throwing the ball straight up, left hand catches. Do the same with left hand, throwing under the left arm, throwing straight up, right hand catches. The catches, the way I did it anyway, are about at height of the apex of the throw. Looks funky, non-jugglers seem to be less impressed than fellow jugglers.
Similar to the last routine, and harder to explain, I used the same technique, but instead of alternating throws and catches on alternating sides, I threw and caught in a circular motion. Throw with left hand under the right arm, but instead of a straight up throw, the throw (from my point of view) went circular, counterclockwise towards my left side of my body, where my right hand would catch it. Then after that throw, my right hand throws from my right side towards my left side, in the same arc as the last ball. And so on. Once again, I think that fellow jugglers are more impressed by it than non-jugglers.
I may be forgetting something, but I think that was the limit of my 3 ball routines, not counting single ball tricks incorporated in some of the above, such as throwing a ball under a leg here and there.
Early on I also learned to juggle (3) rings and pins, with very few routines.
Going back to early on, juggling 3 balls in a circular pattern, either direction, I learned to juggle 4 counterclockwise, from my point of view (i.e the circle started with throwing from my right hand and catching with my left, with a short transfer from my left hand to my right. being a righty I never managed to juggle 4 in the other direction. Sigh.
Which brings me to 5 balls. I only learned to juggle 5 in a basic underhanded criss-cross pattern. At my prime, I would occasionally screw up getting started, but once started, I could continue in that pattern for roughly 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time before collisions happened, or things got out of control and I had to catch all 5 balls preemptively to stop near-future collisions.
I no longer juggle that often, and relearning 5 balls isn’t easy, but I have done it twice during Christmas time to impress different girlfriends of my brothers. Basically we were all going to my parents’ house for the holidays, so before I visited, I practiced 5 balls after about a decade of not juggling 5 at all. I would get to the point where I could juggle 5 (indoors on my knees due to low ceilings and winter weather outdoors) for about 30 seconds on a good run, and collisions after about 5 seconds (still several throws) on most of my other runs.
By the way, it was invariably my weaker left handed throws that ultimately screwed up my 5 ball juggling. After watching your Jason Garfield link, I realize now that with practice I perhaps could mix up my routine each time I started running into trouble, and use some easier routines until I got my equilibrium (for lack of a better word) back. I just may restart juggling 5 balls again with that thought in mind. However it does mean that I need to learn some other 5 ball patterns….
Than you for the links, it should be easy for me to find other useful links now that it occurs to me to actually look for them….
Damn. In reply to my long reply to you, I wrote:
I learned something hard to explain, but here goes all of the above are 3 balls (so far), including this routine: Throw using right hand under the left arm on the left side of the body, throwing the ball straight up, left hand catches. Do the same with left hand, throwing under the left arm, throwing straight up, right hand catches. The catches, the way I did it anyway, are about at height of the apex of the throw. Looks funky, non-jugglers seem to be less impressed than fellow jugglers.
This should read:
I learned something hard to explain, but here goes all of the above are 3 balls (so far), including this routine: Throw using right hand under the left arm on the left side of the body, throwing the ball straight up, left hand catches. Do the same with left hand, throwing under the right arm, throwing straight up, right hand catches. The catches, the way I did it anyway, are about at height of the apex of the throw. Looks funky, non-jugglers seem to be less impressed than fellow jugglers.
happyjuggler0,
Did not see your reply until just now. If you have time, you will find sport juggling quite enjoyable to watch even if you don’t have the time to get your skills back. And by sport juggling I don’t mean the stupid juggle while you run type stuff. Rather, I mean straight up hard as possible technical juggling designed to out perform the other guy. This is a promo for one of the competitions http://youtu.be/S3rAsEVIAN0
Also, learn site swap, than you will know what to call your patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siteswap
Do you recommend your post, or the book?
Great post from Jim Manzi on Bell Labs:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/294143/bell-labs-scale-and-innovation-jim-manzi
I think he left out some later innovations like UNIX and the C programming language.
Bell Labs was also not allowed to commercialize some of their work like UNIX.
When I was younger I mastered 5 balls with not too much difficulty, but I never could juggle four balls, because it’s a different pattern altogether. With 5 balls you can do the underhanded criss-cross thing, as with 3 balls, but much quicker. The underhanded criss cross method must be done with an odd-number of balls, as you can’t really do the criss-cross thing with an even number of balls without them colliding together. Juggling four balls requires juggling two balls in each hand, and if you are ambidextrous this should be a pretty easy skill to learn, but if you are not ambidextrous juggling four balls is pretty difficult. However, it seems most jugglers who are not ambidextrous can learn the odd-number of ball criss-cross method pretty easily.
Generally even patterns are considered harder then odd ones for reasons that you have alluded to. But you are the first person I have ever heard claim that four is easier than five. Most people find 4 eaiser to learn then five for reasons I touched on earlier.
I am not ambidextrous but it did not take me long to learn 4. I just taught my left hand to juggle two balls. From there it is a small step to juggling four at once.
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