Where is my mind?
Just getting myself back together after my holiday to Berlin. I’ll post something more substantial when I’m recovered.
Pete Hindle
Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.
Tag: juggling
July 27, 2010
The Five-Ball Flash Links
Above: the retro/Victoriana/steampunk video for “Flush”. I like the giga-Victoria.
I’ve been learning to juggle five balls recently. Four balls is pretty boring; essentially, it’s throwing two balls in one hand simultaneously – something that’s hard, but not impossible. Throwing five balls is something other entirely, requiring a serious amount of practice and training. Thankfully, I’ve got the internet to help out.
- http://www.jugglingarchives.com/ is a website devoted to uncovering the history of juggling in Newcastle and area. I didn’t know their was one, but it’s fascinating to browse.
- Boppo’s Number Juggling Notes are an interesting insight into what it takes to juggle more than three balls.
- This is a page of general juggling advice on five balls, from various people. Many paths to the same route, but with a goal like juggling five it’s best to find out as much as possible.
- Juggling goes back a way on the internet, but it’s original usenet group is best accessed via this page on jugglingdb.com. It’s pretty web 1.0, but that’s ok.
- One of the better jugglers dealing with web 2.0 stuff is Luke Barrage, who in addition to being a professional entertainer, also runs a sci-fi book review podcast, and a now-moribund juggling podcast (rss link).
I don’t read all this stuff a lot, because it’s maddening to think about it at the same time as trying to do it. There’s a certain about of mindful meditation, but after a while I’ve just been listening to music. When not throwing balls into the air, I’ve been catching up with my reading or watching movies. It’s not all work work work, y’know.
May 28, 2010
Upcoming Juggling Residency
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be undertaking a residency at 25 Stratford grove this August, where I’ll be working with juggling. We had a brief run-through and experimentation with what you can do with juggling balls and a room full of artists on Sunday, when Carole Luby hosted an artists crit group. We spent some time in the garden, discussing various projects and working on our various sunburns, before heading inside to see a performance piece called “Queer Hope” by David Reynolds.
Arto Polus has some documentation of the day at his website, so please click through for the other serious artists, and a couple of pictures of me throwing balls around.
It was also nice to meet Andrej and Ewelina in person, finally, and I really enjoyed their company during the day. They are doing the Digital Media Mres that I’m now loosely attached to, so it was interesting to hear some other students talking about the course.
May 19, 2010
London Trip
Yesterday I took a trip into London by myself. I’d arranged to met up with Jock Mooney, who made this video:
We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.
I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.
After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.
This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.
Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation
d=b/(h + h/b)
where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.
Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:
After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.
April 25, 2009
Juggling
I’ve been juggling a lot recently.
That’s the regular juggling pattern. It’s like learning to ride a bike; once you can do it, you can’t really forget it.
That’s the reverse cascade. It’s quite fun.
I think I found a name for this one somewhere on wikipedia, but I’ve lost that link for now. Notice that there is a ball in the middle that keeps getting caught, but not really thrown from hand to hand.
This might be Mill’s Mess, but I’m not sure. It’s like the pattern above, but with a sort of arm-crossing.
