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‘Bird Man’ Hoaxster Comes Clean on Dutch Television
- cjy 15y agoDiscussion on the original claim: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732385 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732385
- daeken 15y agoOh wow, this is the same guy behind Metalosis Maligna. That was a fantastic faux-documentary.
- dsr_ 15y agoI don't think anyone is really surprised, but there's certainly a place in my head which wishes it had been real. Oh well.
- ars 15y agoIt can be real. Just add a motor with a fan in the back. Your arms and legs can still do all the steering and altitude control (which is where the fun lies). It's the flapping that is impossible. It's so incredibly clear than the kind of flapping shown in the video can not provide lift (no matter how strong your motor, and no matter how large the wings) that I don't understand how anyone was fooled for even a second. If you want to flap then on each upstroke you have to either fold the wing or rotate it. Otherwise you get nothing except an up-and-down bobbing. If you ever get a chance to hold a bird extend its wings and look at the construction and the way it moves. Notice especially the "elbow" in the middle of the wing.
- lgeek 15y agoAlso see Yves Rossy. He's flying with a tiny jet-powered wing and does all the steering with his body (there are no other control surfaces). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIJLLkTrF4w&t=1m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIJLLkTrF4w&t=1m10s
- Malcx 15y agoTed talk with Yves, lacking a bit in technical detail but worth a watch. http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman.html http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman.html
- bane 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragliding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragliding
- astrec 15y agoEvery time I launch into the endless blue, unpowered, under a wing comprised entirely of what was just a crumpled mess of fabric just moments before, it's real for me. Besides, why bother with flapping when you can soar and thermal? ;)
- chj 15y agowhat can i say? this is certainly not funny
- epaga 15y agoI still am completely confused at how professional editors at both Wired Science AND Gizmodo that must see loads of fake videos every day were unable to tell the video was a fake. Especially the takeoff had the obviously-CG look about it -- didn't it? It is so strange that it makes me genuinely wonder whether they didn't actually realize it was fake and just wanted to generate controversy and page views. On the other hand, even Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters said there was "nothing about the video that seemed fake" to him. Wha...? Seriously?
- manojlds 15y agoJamie said he would give it the benefit of the doubt. But yeah, it did seem cg'ed to me when I first saw it. Only reason I even gave it a second look was because it was on Giz. Well, apparently, they don't even try to verfiy what they are publishing.
- redthrowaway 15y agoWell yeah, it's Giz. Sorry, but any "journalism" coming from Gawkmedia should be taken as fluff until otherwise verified.
- ars 15y agoI was just as baffled as you. The only thing I can think of is that people want it to be true so badly that they don't really want to look for errors.
- kaybe 15y agoIt's not like anything actually changes for most people. Judging wrongly carries virtually no cost at all.
- JonnieCache 15y agoIf you're science editor for a media organisation, you shouldn't even need to look at the video to know that it's fake. If you lack the elementary mechanical knowledge to immediately assert it's impossibility from the description alone, you are unqualified to do your job IMO. I suppose there was that whole blag about an "exoskeleton" but that's no excuse. Occam's razor and all that.
- BasDirks 15y agoCheckout his amazing fake documentary Metalosis Maligna: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHtKMS1kjlo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHtKMS1kjlo Be warned, it's pretty graphic stuff.
- malkia 15y agoI do remember reading a book as a kid, where it explained that our human muscles are relatively x70 less stronger to birds when compared to the body weight - e.g. you need on average to be x70 stronger with your hands to be able to flap and fly.... But I'm not sure how accurate that is. It was fun fact (or not? not sure... but when I saw the guy flying, I guess it might've been faked)
- reneherse 15y agoI remember seeing a similar calculation that for a human to fly using scaled bird wings one's pectoral muscles would have to be about 6 feet thick. So we're not talking arc reactor levels of power, but probably more than one can output from a small backpack of batteries like in the vid ;)
- fr0sty 15y ago> but probably more than one can output from a small backpack of batteries like in the vid ;) Actually, Lithium-Polymer battery packs capable of a sustained output in excess of 2kW weigh only a few pounds.
- onemoreact 15y agoPeople can do 2kW for a little while, you need closer to ~50kW or really really big and light wings. At which point your 200lb of battery's and moters bump that to ~100kW.
- redthrowaway 15y agoI think I speak for most when I say that my reaction to this news is "expected disappointment". I never truly believed it was real, but I wanted to. Dearly. I very much wanted to believe that some Dutch guy had realized the dreams of Icarus. I wanted to believe that it was possible that I, too, could soar through the clouds with nothing but my own body and some nylon keeping me aloft. Regardless, let us not deride the filmaker, nor undeservedly dismiss his goals. He wanted to make us dream, and in that he succeeded. Let us take from this a renewed sense of the possible; let us allow our doubts to float away and think once more as children. Let us see in this a promise, perhaps not of human-powered flight, but of the power of human imagination. Let us realize that the reaction to this video reflects a deeper yearning, and let us strive to fill that hole. We will likely never achieve the dream of unassisted flight, but we may yet achieve other dreams as seemingly hopeless. Let us not allow ourselves to be too greatly constrained by what is, that we miss what might be.
- Produce 15y ago>could soar through the clouds with nothing but my own body and some nylon keeping me aloft. For crying out loud, just go skydiving already.
- redthrowaway 15y agoDone it; loved everything before the chute opened. Everything after was a boring interlude that threatened my ability to have children. Also, holy fuck my ears.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- peter_l_downs 15y ago> I never truly believed it was real, but I wanted to. This is what sells any great hoax. I also think it's interesting that the ability to get people to believe in and desire something is exactly what a great entrepreneur/CEO/salesman (see: Steve Jobs) must do to make their product a success.
- 15y ago
- pgtart 15y agoAlso ufo's officially don't exist, but have great military value. So watch next stealth (dutch??) wing troopers. Oh well its not only DARPA that exist other countries have their inventions too.
- andrewfelix 15y agoWhen Jesus Diaz posted it on Gizmodo, the immediate response from commenter's was suspicion. Diaz responded by lambasting the critical readers. Here's a choice quote: "It is doable and he did it. It's not fake. It's been covered by the euro press and it's real." Have a read of some of his other less thoughtful comments: http://gizmodo.com/people/jesusdiaz/comments http://gizmodo.com/people/jesusdiaz/comments
- petroica 15y agoI saw his responses and realized how fortunate I was to not have read Gizmodo in several years. Here are some of my other favorite quotes from him: "The burden of proof is on you. These guys did something, showed it to the world, and the typical armchair experts who usually scream PHOTOSHOPPED! or FAKE! are doing exactly that from their offices, dens and basements." "Yes, and the go camera video is also faked. And all the newspaper and TV coverage. I'm so tired of the armchair FAKE experts who don't have a fucking clue."
- skrebbel 15y ago> I think I speak for most when I say that my reaction to this news is "expected disappointment". I never truly believed it was real, but I wanted to. Dearly. This was exactly the point. The guy is a movie maker, a story teller. By positioning it as real instead of a hollywood blockbuster, it got these emotions going inside a lot of people. Moving people is the goal of any story teller, and by doing it this way, and this well, the impact was much bigger than if the film had been called "My Special Effects work: flying like a bird". Neo does a lot more spectacular things in The Matrix, but it moves us less precisely because we know that it's all CGI. I say, a massive success. The only way to tell a more moving story is to tell a real story of something spectacular. This is what all the war journalists are doing - genocides and floods always do well on public TV. Essentially, you could call the Bird Man hoax the "good news" version of the same goal.
- skrebbel 15y agohuh? what was not fit for HN about my comment? if you disagree with the content, how about your respond instead?
- justjimmy 15y ago"People are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true." - Zeddicus
- grannyg00se 15y agoEight months of work to produce an obviously fake/impossible low quality video? It's surprising that it took so long.
- tokenadult 15y agoThe whole "bird man" incident does a lot to illustrate why The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254 http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Const... may be the most important new book published in the last year. I had just finished reading the book when the "bird man" story broke, and what did I see on Hacker News threads but many people saying that they believed the story because they wanted to believe it, and they would believe a single, otherwise unevidenced claim in a self-produced video rather than the whole body of tested theory from currrent physical science. This is the usual observation of human behavior: people form beliefs first, for largely self-reassuring reasons, and then strive mightily to hunt up rationales for maintaining those beliefs, despite contrary evidence. Really, to raise the quality of discussion here on Hacker News, we all ought to read The Believing Brain at our earliest opportunity and think about all the threads we have seen here where participants conclude first and ask questions later.
- tathagatadg 15y agoThink of the shame people are facing who posted the story to their social network and backed it up with spirits uplifting comments like "if you have a dream, you can fly"! - reassuring faith in engineering and hard work(8 years he said). One particularly missing feature of the feel-good video was the lack of technical details ... but then you believe the source from where it came and your brain accepts it based on the established trust relationship with the source (in this case, hackernews/weird science) - and more importantly a video. The difference between watching news and movies - is what we should compare this video to. When I'm seeing the space station in a news clip my brain is telling me this is legit because what I have seen previously from this source has proven to be legit. But when I see death star being blown up, I'm realize its fake because it comes from a source which, well, told you Jedi traits were real. :( Whatever you proved bird man, you won't be able to sleep at night. Ever.
- angersock 15y agoI'd like to chime in as one of the folks who was ardent in the defense of the possibility of the birdman and who turned out to be wrong. It's a shame that this ended up being faked instead of real, but I would like to point out to the community something before we all start talking about how easy people are to dupe, how easy it is for people to ignore reality for something they believe, and how some folks were right all along. The way the (original, I think?) thread went down was a mixture of claims that it was obviously fake, backed by some comments and notations basically of the variety of "It looks shooped, I can tell from some of the pixels." There was absurd amounts of unsubstantiated criticism, and very little criticism based on anything other than the video. There was not "this is fake, but technically feasible for these reasons." There was not "this is fake, and technically infeasible for these reasons." There was not "this is fake, and obviously infeasible for these reasons." The handful of attempts that people made to explain why it was physically impossible (beyond the mere statement of "lol y u no physics education") oftentimes ignored the claimed evidence and circumstances of the act (e.g., asserted manual power instead of assisted flight) or tried to base it on some weird analogy using the natural world (e.g., a bird's weight scales thus-and-such a way) or just plain appealed to authority (e.g., in the whole history of human flight we've never gotten this to work). There was an equally poor showing on the part of people arguing it was possible (I among them). Very few real numbers were pulled out, and more thorough analysis would've been appreciated. But, at the end of it, here's the core narrative we need to question: 1. Person does something seemingly impossible. 2. HN says it isn't possible, can't be possible, appealing solely at first to the video and the shooping. 3. HN minority tries to reason that it might be possible, is met with bad analogy and analysis. 4. Person turns out to be fake, lots of sorrow and/or "We were right!" Folks, we need to do a better job of 2 & 3. We can't just jump on things as impossible without doing the math, without doing the numbers. We need to be honest in our critiques, and distinguish between "impossible in general" and "impossible for this implementation". We don't judge our code by some of the pixels--why do you want to judge engineering writ large this way?