Juggling with Bemmu

Bemmu

I'm writing this sitting on a bench outside with a laptop. This has proved to be a less than optimal experience, since because of the sun I can hardly see anything. I also noticed that I had accidentally deltreed the directory that contained my two unfinished Hugi articles. A great start no? This almost makes me continue writing another article about motivation, but I'll try something different. How about juggling? Have you ever seen someone keep three balls in the air simultaneously? Or bowling pins, or torches? It may look impossible, but with some practise you'll be doing that too. At least the balls. I wouldn't try throwing chainsaws as a first attempt. The trick is in timing. The key thing here is recognizing when each ball has reached its peak height. This is when you throw the next ball. The other tricky thing is aim. You aren't supposed to be good in catching balls, you're supposed to be excellent in throwing them. If you are good in throwing, catching will be a lot easier. Start with one ball. Throw it up and down so that it reaches your eye level. See how it actually takes some time for it to fly in the air. Enough that you'd be able to do something while it's in the air. Try saying "object oriented" quickly while it's flying. See? Now take note of when it reaches its peak height. Try saying "foo" each time it reaches the peak. Next try throwing that one ball from your right hand to your left and back. Make it fly through the air in a parabolic manner so that it flies through the air and not just straight from one hand to the other. Take note of the peak of the parabola. Hopefully you're now comfortable with one ball and it doesn't fall to the ground after each throw. Now let's try that with two balls. So you've got ball (or sock, or whatever) A and ball B. Throw ball A from your right hand to your left like you're used to. But when ball A reaches its peak position you throw ball B from your left hand towards your right hand in a similar but a bit lower parabolic manner. You continue in a similar manner. Here is an illustration. A B A B B A B A B A -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 1 2 3 4 5 (now back to 2) You have to practice this for a while to get comfortable. When you think you're reasonably good you can add the third ball. Some people learn this slower than others. It took me 20 hours to train so that I could juggle three balls for a while. For a friend it took 2 hours. Brr... the breeze is getting cold out here. Anyways. Let's continue. You might have noticed that there is some idle time when throwing two balls. I'm talking about phase 2 in the illustration. See how ball A is flying towards the left hand and ball B is starting its flight towards the right hand? See what the right hand is doing at this point? Absolutely nothing. It's idle. Waiting for ball B. So if you had three balls, this is where you'd throw the third ball. A B C A B AC B C A C A B C B -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 1 2 3 4 5 (continue like in 2) We add ball C to the mix. Since you only have two hands, you need to have two balls in one hand at the start. There are no more tricks but practice. If you can't understand this illustration, try searching for "juggling" with some search engine on the net, and you'll find nice illustrations and even java applets. Enjoy the summer. Bemmu