Missed the premiere and a repeat is on in a few minutes. Think I’ll miss it again.
To be fair, they explictly said “a head of human hair”, and got all of the hair from a single person’s ponytail.
I started to watch it but fell asleep. What was the deal with the 2 big strong guys who couldn’t lift a tiny woman?
She dropped one of her feet back and shifted her weight onto it, thus moving her center of weight away from the SG. When she wanted to be lifted she leaned in. That was the explanation, anyway. I can’t really say that I accept it. :dubious:
I was really disappointed with this show. I couldn’t tell if the claims were supposed to be lies or the videos were just staged. In the one with the hair I was pretty sure if you braided hair into a rope it could hold a lot of weight. But how would I know if they had put a steel cable in the middle of the rope for their demonstration? In the end, I didn’t care.
This is an old trick, and works just like that. She shifts her weight from 6" away from the guys CG to 18" away. That extra foot in the length of the lever that is your arms requires much more strenth to lift, and makes it almost impossible to maintain balance on your feet if your arms are strong enough to lift her. A skilled performer can also lower her CG, making it more difficult to maintain your balance, use her hands to put pressure on your forearms, or just go fairly limp.
The supposed idea is that if you’re watching really carefully, you’ll spot clues in the fake one. The tiger one had one of the supposed security cameras taping the stone lions at the New York public library. Presumably if they had faked the hair one, they would have included some tip-off like that.
Interestingly, Penn mentioned the point that they could’ve put a steel cable in the middle of the hair, and we’d never know. In fact, he asked the guy who donated the hair if he thought there was a cable in it, and the guy just muttered something like “I don’t know.”
This series should be called Bullshit instead.
They apparently had about 20 Hi-Def “security” cameras that could pan and zoom pointed on an area between cages of animals… a tiger who only was interested in “attacking” hands and forearms… that didn’t cause even a scratch let alone any blood during his “fierce attack”… a keeper who lays on his back while being attacked by a tiger… another keeper who’s idea of helping is to stand back ten yards and wave his arms in the air… and the idea that the best thing to do is to put your arm in the middle of the jaw with the sharp tiger teeth clamping down.
Yup… it was the stone lions that gave it away.
That trick’s been around since the Pharaohs. It’s pretty well-known.
Thanks for the explanation. And I understood what you were saying. I just forgot to shorten the quote. I was just responding to the part where you said they did it successfully. That’s the only part I was unsure about. Now I get it.
Yeah, but these guys were really strong dudes. I can’t believe that they weren’t going along with the gag a little bit.
It’s not that they’re unable to lift her, it’s that they can’t lift her without falling over.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t really paying that much attention but were they instructed to not step closer to her? Because that would seem the natural thing to do.
She changed her stance. The first time she stood with her feet side-by-side under her torso. The second time she put one foot forward. The only way the men could have stepped closer to her would have been to push her leg out of the way.
Part of the trick is starting with the lift allowed, so the lifter thinks it’s not too difficult to do. The second time the lifter doesn’t expect it to be any different is unprepared for the balancing problem. You wouldn’t want to give the lifter another chance because they would be prepared to adjust their stance once they’ve experienced the difficulty.
There’s a parlor game that goes under a variety of names where four people try to lift a single person, each using only 2 fingers. In that version the gimmick is that they fail the first time, but succeed the second time. The trick takes advantage of peoples ability to make adjustments to a physical quickly after trying it once. If you have to lift or move a heavy object, you usually give it a little shove to guage it’s weight and effect on your balance first. Without thinking you’ll adjust your hands and feet to better handle the weight.
I wasn’t watching much of the show that closely, but they really highlighted the problems with the tiger video. The first thing that made me think it was fake was the zookeeper/tiger expert was out picking up tiger crap. I figured some minumum wage workers or vet school interns would be doing that kind of work.
As** Robot Arm **mentions, the airplane door video also seemed hokey because they left out roll control as a way to compensate for lack of rudder. Also pilots usually don’t talk about ‘steering’ a plane.
I just didn’t like the show though. It’s not their style to just show video gimmicks.
Well, 50% of the watchers also figured it out. And I don’t think most of them saw the Lion statue.
It would work better if it were like the other shows of this genre, which usually use reenactments. That way you judge based on the claim itself. You can even still use interviews with the real people if you want to keep the focus on the lie detection part.
I didn’t notice the lion statue camera. But I felt the tiger video looked staged. I’ve seen genuine security video footage and it rarely looks as good as the faked stuff. It’s usually a tip-off when the action is centered on camera - that almost never happens in real footage. And the tiger attack footage was particuarly bad - we were seeing the attack from several different angles that all happened to be focused on where the attack was.
I was mostly worried that the premise is inherently troubling. I remember reading an article a while back from Paulos, the guy who wrote Innumeracy, that if you tell people “It’s not the case that X” people come away remembering X, not the negation. Rather than combine a sense of wonder with an exercise in healthy skepticism, which is I think ideally what this premise amounts to whether it succeeds or not, probably what it’ll mostly amount to is spreading new bullshit memes.