real or fake

Reader Jorge has also looked at these amazing basketball shots. (here is my last basketball analysis) Jorge claims that at least one shot seems fake. He is referring to the following video (at around the 2:20 mark). ARRGH Ok, new plan. For some dumb reason, youtube won't let me embed this video. Well, here is a link - Amazing Basketball Shots: The Legendary Shots 4 (at least I can link to the right time). It is even dumber that you can't embed it, but youtube gives you the download option. Oh well. Let me tell you the part that Jorge has an issue with. This guy on a ladder throws a…
I have seen several videos similar to this. Real? Fake? How many tries did this take? Let the analysis begin. Before I do any analysis, let me state that I think this is not fake. I do not know that for sure, just my first guess. How would I tell if it is real or fake? This is tricky. I can't really get a good trajectory of the ball to make some measurements on it because of the camera angle (next time people, make sure you set the camera up perpendicular to the plane of motion and far enough away to avoid perspective problems - thanks!) Really, the best I can do is to look at the…
Frank Noschese is a physics teacher and a blogger (and frequent commenter on Dot Physics). And I nominate Frank as the new librarian of videos that can be analyzed for realness or fakeness. Or, as Frank calls them Win-Fail Physics. Note that I sort of changed his theme a little - sorry Frank. Win-Fail physics videos are all over the place. You know I like these things. They are videos that look cool and people question if they are real or fake. Sometimes it is easy to tell, sometimes it takes a little analysis, and sometimes it is very difficult to tell (and I get it wrong). So, here is…
Here is a commercial for some Mercedes car. The first part is quite boring, but check out the stunt at around 2:00 minutes into the video. I haven't bothered to check if this is officially fake or not. Instead, I will do what I do - see if this is even feasible. The common question people ask when they see something like this is: "how does the car defy gravity?" Well, it doesn't. Why doesn't it fall? In a sense it does. This is essentially the same as spinning a bucket of water over your head. Maybe a diagram of the car at the top of the tunnel will help. I tried to make the car stand…
Of course I am talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. After looking at how many bullets he carries in Commando, I remembered this scene (also from Commando) (warning: maybe some not great language and some killing. You have been warned) If you don't want to watch that clip, here is a shot (sorry for the quality). Clearly Arnold is strong, but there is more than strength involved here. Oh, don't bring your "he did it with wire stuff". I am not buying that. Also, I am talking about THE Arnold - he is real. I am not talking about the character in the movie (not real). Now for some physics…
Normally, it isn't really news when a show doesn't do anything wrong. I am making an exception for ESPN's Sport Science. Here is part 2 of Sport Science trying to reproduce Kobe Bryant's "jumping over a car" stunt. And here is part 1 (although part 2 is the only interesting part). See. I can get along with Sport Science. Anyway, I am not sure that Kobe's jump used wires - but I assumed it was fake. Here is my analysis of Kobe's Jump (this stuff is old). And this is the plot I created from video analysis of Kobe. The tough thing about looking at Kobe's jump is that he changes his body…
Here is a quick Apolo Ohno quiz. Which one of these pictures is fake? If you picked picture B - you are probably correct. That is a picture of "Apolo" being catapulted into a pool of slime at the Nickelodeon awards show (click on the link to see the video - I don't think I can embed it). Ok - time to crank out an analysis. I think I could approach this analysis from a couple of directions. Since all I have is a crappy version of the video, I could just look at "could this be possible"? The other analysis I could do would be to measure his acceleration in free fall. Let me start with…
Let me be clear. I am not really an attacker. If someone wrote a report about ski jumping or something and misused the word "momentum", no big deal. However, if you have a show that claims to be about SCIENCE and you are obviously putting a lot of money into this show AND a whole bunch of people will see and think this is science - then you need to be a little careful. I think shows like ESPN's Sport Science are a good idea - you know, introduce some cool science ideas by using cool sports. This show just needs some help. Yes, I know I make mistakes. I try to correct them when I become…
Hat tip to Frank for sending me a link to this video: If you have never done a demo like this (without the motorcycle), you should. It really isn't too difficult. Here is a video of my version: Inertial demo from Rhett Allain on Vimeo. So, the question is: is the motorcycle thing real or fake? First, let me talk about the key aspect of this demo. Why don't the glasses move? Well, they move - but just not very far. The demo is supposed to be an example of Newton's Second law, or you could say it is the momentum principle (which is what I will use). If a force is applied for a short time…
Forgive me for all the posts on ESPN's Sport Science (example: Pulling and Power). I can't help myself. In the short episode recently, Sport Science compared a football player pulling a sled with huge tires on it to a truck pulling stuff. I think their goal was to compare the power per kg from for the player and the truck to show how awesome humans are (and let me just say that humans ARE awesome). The problem was that they really didn't give the truck a fair chance. For the first test, they had Marshawn Lynch pull 585 pounds of stuff. The real question should be: how hard does he have to…
I would like to continue my attack on the show Sport Science - ESPN. In this short episode, they are comparing the power of NFL player Marshawn Lynch with that of a truck. You can watch it here if you would like. There are two things that are not quite right with this episode, first, the power thing. I will save the friction problem for another post. So, if you didn't watch that clip, the basic idea is that Marshawn pulls some heavy tires. Sport Science then calculates the power needed to do this and then repeats a similar thing for a truck. Quick review. What is power? In short,…
Since my previous post on R2-D2 flying was so popular, I thought I would follow it up. I was going to add these two points in the comments, but a separate post seems to make more sense. Point 1 - R2 flies at a constant speed Well, he obviously doesn't always have to fly at a constant speed. However, in the clip I was looking at there are two important things in the analysis. What angle is R2's thrusters at? Is R2 flying at a constant speed? I found a much better quality version of the flying R2 from Billy Brook's site. That helped out a lot. So, on to Tracker Video Analysis (I always…
You know I can't help but like Star Wars. Even with the new stuff, I watch it. Recently, I was watching the Clone Wars cartoon and noticed something odd about the way R2-D2 flies. I know what you are saying...."the odd thing is that he flies at all. Why didn't he fly in episodes 4-6?" Who knows. Here is the best image I could get of R2-D2 flying (from wookieepedia). What is wrong? Well, maybe you can't tell from the image I posted. Here is a diagram of flying R2-D2. If R2 (I can call him that because we are good friends) was flying like that, why would that be a problem? That would…
This is great. Many people have already reported google's apple-dropping homepage in honor Newton's birthday. In case it disappears, here is a screen shot. So, I got this awesome note from Dale Basler. He said that his class had analyzed this falling apple animation. What a very Dot Physics-y idea (check out his analysis). He said they were questioning the results which might be due screen capture issues. I decided to reproduce this. I captured the motion with Apple's Quicktime X screen recording feature. I then used Tracker Video Analysis - which now has an autotracking feature that…
I put together this short presentation on fake videos for a class. What the heck, I will also put it online so that maybe some other people can use it. So, here it is. I have it in many forms. First, a video of me going through the talk. Then I have the keynote and PowerPoint files with the movies. Feel free to use it as you see fit. You might want to modify some of the files, I have no problem with that. How to spot a fake video from Rhett Allain on Vimeo. And the other versions: Keynote (fakevideos.key - 46.1 MB) - this has the movies embedded PowerPoint (fakevideos.ppt - 2.6 MB) -…
This is amazing. I can't believe that power companies are paying Blacklight Power money, but they are. I guess Blacklight Power must have great advertising. Ok, so what is this whole Blacklight-hyrdino thing? Honestly, I am not fully familiar with it, but basically this guy says that you can get energy by getting the electron in hydrogen to go to a lower energy level than ground state. Here are a few good links regarding this hydrino stuff. Six Tiny Utilities Buy "Scientifically Impossible" Energy: CleanTechnica Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water - is this for real? |…
Check this out (saw it on the interwebs): It's this video inside a bus of a girl hitting the roof. My first thought was: well, she just jumped. But something was odd. She was in the air too long. Well, of course this calls for a video analysis (using Tracker Video Analysis). Actually, it is a good candidate for analysis. Primarily because the motion happens right next to the back of the bus and the bus can be considered the reference frame. The only problem is the scale. I totally guessed that the back window was 3 feet, but not sure this even matters. Here is the motion of the girl…
Sciencegeekgirl is blogging from the AAPT. She talks about showing something interesting to get students thinking, and here is her example: This reminds me of Dan Meyer's What Can You Do With This stuff. Anyway, I can't help it. I must analyze this video. Plus, Fran essentially threw down the gauntlet and called me out on this move. Another reason to analyze this movie is that it is obviously fake. Elephants are one of the few animals that can't jump. Not even a little bit. They don't like to have more than 1 foot off the ground. Ok, on to the analysis. As usual, I downloaded the…
I have been wanting to look at this whole curved bullet thing, but I wasn't sure how to approach it. In case you are familiar with the myth, this is from the movie WANTED (which I did not see). Apparently, some people learn how to make bullets curve by moving their gun. Here is a shot of a bullet curving in front of someone. Maybe the picture doesn't do the clip justice, but it is enough for you to get an idea. Before I do an analysis, this reminds me of a great educational activity. In the activity, you give groups of students a full sheet of paper with lines that look something like…
I haven't seen the Pixar Movie "Up" yet, so don't spoil it for me. I have, however, seen the trailer. In my usual fashion, I have to find something to complain about. There is this scene where the old man releases balloons out of the house. What is wrong with this scene? Also, would that be enough balloons to make the house float? Here is a shot of the balloons coming out of the house. Ok, I was already wrong. The first time I saw this trailer I thought the balloons were stored in his house. After re-watching in slow motion, it seems the balloons were maybe in the back yard held down…