Archery World Record: Most arrows through a keyhole [video]
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Or Olympic archery:
Even pool players are extremely still in their motion:
Lars shoots a different style, which is basically "draw and loose" with very little "aiming". The aiming done in that situation is to basically "look at what you want to hit".
Here's a Smarter Every Day episode that shows some of that. You see Byron Ferguson there already putting the arrow on but there's no aiming. When the mint is thrown in the air, he just looks at the mint and instinctively aims and shoots it in mid air.
https://youtu.be/Q8Yp9SjCU5E?t=225
I recommend the whole episode.
Also Legendary Howard Hill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36R7cLzPNuw
It's amazing how well this works if you don't need to hit a mint and no worries of shooting a person and even without exactly spined arrows and with just a stick and a string for a bow. Source: I do this for fun (with larger targets).
Reminds me of a friend's bachelor party out in the woods where we were shooting guns. A couple friends brought big revolvers and so I tried shooting them at some targets. Missed every one. I decided if I wasn't gonna hit anything, I should at least have fun, so I took two of them and did a Yosemite Sam impression firing them akimbo at the targets in rapid fire and I heard a PING PING PING PING of 4 shots hit in a row from 2 different guns fired in tandem.
Sometimes the best aim is no aiming at all.
There are times where I have time to line up my shot and track the enemy in my sights and yet in some cases I miss all my shots (I actually end up being out of sync with the enemy’s lateral moves, essentially lagging behind).
On the other hand, there are times where an enemy surprises me and I move my mouse in a sudden motion, shooting while it’s still moving - I manage to land the vast majority of those shots (sometimes shooting twice in panic, but the first one turns out to be a hit - this is on PC so no aim assist as far as I know).
Not that I would like to “prove” this hypothesis in actual combat, but I wonder if taking shots “by feel” is actually better than doing so carefully and consciously.
The game is effectively giving you a way more massive hit box when you’re not scoping than when you are. In turn you are more likely to hit something but you usually do lower damage and bullets will prefer the torso hit box, so you’re unlikely to get a head shot.
Since you emphasized PC I assume you’re also thinking of aim assist on consoles. Those are related but different techniques to help gamers.
Aim assist moves the reticle closer to a hit box centre in screen space. However it doesn’t increase the hit box size because you’d often have overlapping hit boxes in screen space.
Adaptive Hit boxes exist in world space and grow and shrink accordingly to user aim mode.
Indeed, it's closer to a field athlete (basketball, soccer, etc) shooting/throwing a ball.
Lots of "muscle memory". Kind of like someone else mentioned, throwing a ball. You don't have a sight you aim with when you throw a ball. You look at what you want to hit and throw. You don't do that very consciously though. Your body and subconscious just do it for you.
Not sure if that was in that video or another one but he trains every day. He's got a deer target right outside his door at a typical range for hunting and every time he walks out he just takes a shot at it (plus a really nice outdoor 3D course right on his property).
my sister when she was in college was incredibly good at hitting small things across the room by finger snapping bottle caps.
Works surprisingly well for unsighted shots.
Good video testing this method:
The first time I saw that killed any interest I might have had in 'serious' archery (I was into it as a kid). It's like watching a weightlifter use an exercise machine.
What are we talking? Like a peanut m&m? A macaroon?
People that do shoot moving targets from what I've seen might just use frisbees or the like. You kinda need a barn full of straw behind it.
If you want to learn more about instinctive archery, here's something on that from Clay Hayes ("Alone" season 8 winner): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mzWQ5_1bXtM and the whole channel is full of (serious - not stunt) archery stuff.
Here, found youtube footage of him shooting the deer that helped him win: https://youtu.be/tI5812NwiS0?t=86
But getting the shots into a keyhole even at a relatively short distance is very impressive still.
Otherwise you just get one award you can never beat.
Double so if there are monetary prizes involved.
I’ve been saying for years that someone needs to reign in Big Keyhole Arrows but the regulators have been asleep at the wheel as per usual. Thanks a lot, (Congress)/(Brussels)/(Obama I guess).
Whereas the eight shot here - if you miss it you still have your seven good ones.
"Once the vaulter enters the competition, they can choose to pass heights. If a vaulter achieves a miss on their first attempt at a height, they can pass to the next height, but they will only have two attempts at that height, as they will be out once they achieve three consecutive misses. Similarly, after earning two misses at a height, they could pass to the next height, when they would have only one attempt.
The competitor who clears the highest height is the winner. "
So, it takes some planning, and some athletes start at heights that they know they will clear easy, just to guarantee them 2nd or 3rd place. Then they continue their attempts at higher bars. Once they know they have won they have 3 more attempts to try and break the record.
Not sure what and how they paid him (if anything), but it wouldn’t have been a Soviet thing.
Also, his last record set in 1994 stood for mighty 20 years and was finally broken on 15 Feb 2014, in Donetsk, of all places. ...
... I don't think we'll see international pole vaulting events in Donetsk in the next 20 years.
Or maybe he had to stop because the arrows break down when passing through the hole. For example, I don’t think it’s good for the fletching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletching)
Or he had 1000 arrows, fired them all through they that keyhole 10 times in a row and they cut out the first 9,993 hits because that made the video boringly long ;-)
Kind of a misleading thing to say it's 'thoroughly debunked' when it's very clearly for entertainment and just says they're 'myths'.
They seem to have attacked the least charitable interpretation of his video. For example, I don’t think he was seriously claiming that warriors would routinely catch opponent’s arrows and fire them back in combat, I thought he was just presenting that as a cool trick.
We have people who really do amazing things but make up wild claims about how it works - magicians.
I guess if a magician actually believed what they were saying was true, that’d be some third thing.
In Lars' case, he is from what I can see a supremely skilled instinctive archer. There are some historical documentation, from some regions ,documenting feats that Lars is capable of doing.
But, "feating" and "combat skills" are very different things (well, they are for sword disciplines, I will blithely assert the same is true in archery). Yes, both require skill. Yes, training one discipline can improve the other. but they're not the same. Just like how writing Haskell (or Lisp) can make you a better C programmer.
Of cause you can. Every single social media body builder who’s obviously on Steroids but is claiming they got to they are by eating whatever the latest marketable product they come across(see referral link in bio) is, are snake oil salesmen’s, even if they are objectively and impossible as muscular as their viewers want to be.
Lars got really good at archery doing what every other archer does… the big dumb secret you ask? He practiced. But it’s difficult to sell pratice, even expensive one on one tutoring only gets you so far. So he invented a narrative where “Big Archery” has been conspirering since the Dark Ages to teach archery wrong, but if you follow his cult of the true archery (click link for details on the subscription pricing), then you too will instantly become an archer supreme, capable of firing several arrows through keyholes!
In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles used by specific people with references.
> In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles
Yes he talks a lot about it and everything he makes up gets quickly and thoroughly debunked. He might as well be claiming that aliens invented archery. He’s a fraud who’s good with a acrobatic trick shots with bow and arrow, not a historian.
I am emphatically not convinced by the attempts to debunk.
Furthermore there is a situation where Lars clearly did start with a source, and attempted to reproduce exactly that. In other words he did what you say he didn't. Does he know what the thing he found is the way it was actually done? He doesn't, and says so. But it is one way it could have been done, and reproduces the historical feats of archery.
It started when a group of Native Americans pointed out in https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/videos-lost-and-found... that they have maintained an archery tradition that Lars had ignored. However after Lars talked with actual Comanches, he found that they had lost the technique by which the Comanches fired so quickly. A technique which, according to both pictures and books, was completely different than the style that Lars had figured out based on Arab and Asian sources. They could still make and shoot the bows an arrows, but not at the speed described in history books.
And so, working with a Comanche archer and with authentic Comanche bows and arrows, Lars experimented until to find a method that fit the historical record. He was able to achieve historical speed and accuracy with a very different technique than he used before. Yes, he did it from from horseback, and whoed it could be done while hanging off of horseback. (He doesn't appear to be good enough to actually do it at speed while hanging off an actual horse, but that is a question of horsemanship, not of archery.)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liHlCRpS70k for Lars' version of this. And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMWOUCuZ-kQ for the Comanche he worked with.
If you're a glutton for punishment, he explains himself at length in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4mqt69VZ28. And you get to see what he thinks he got right, what he thinks he got wrong, and the limits of what he claims to know.
The most interesting point for me is that practice with shooting moving things interferes with shooting at a stationary target, and vice versa. This "two related things interfere with each other in your brain" is something I've personally experienced with Go vs Chess. But it is fascinating that it happens with archery.
"How did the Saracens measure seconds?" — My thought exactly!
So it begs the question. How much did Lars pay to put on this event, of all the possible arrow related records he could have made up, why make up this particular one. It seems obvious that it would have been a more honest record to look at consecutive bullseyes or arrows split or something like that, but perhaps the established records from regular competitive archers where to hard for him to beat. And naturally, why is he trying to create a social bus now? Does he have a book coming out or something like that?
Apologies if that's just a spelling error, but if it's an eggcorn / mondegreen, I feel duty-bound to point out that it's Guinness Book of Records, as in a pint of.
Usain Bolt have a world record, anybody can have a Guinness World Record if you have money, and challenge things like most helium balloons tied to a paddleboard while paying Guinness staff to fly around and some big fee to put it in their books.
This one from Lars is actually one of the 'better' ones.
There are any of a thousand of video game speed runs you could probably beat with a week of solid effort, but breaking the Mario 1 speed run is a different league.
And of course on the tracking sites one of the best ways to get noticed is beat a famous record by a bit, or beat an unfamous one by a lot (because a large beat likely means it can be improved more, and so people will try).
This is also why record runs In track mania for example often “calm down” until a new path is shown to work (even in a tool assist) and then there’s a flurry of interest.
I don’t mean to impugn either YouTuber, but I’ve been burned too many times by equating “wow this is cool material” with “this is correct”. I’m almost ashamed to admit that my desire to root for the underdog biases me in their favour precisely because they are outspoken, with disastrous outcomes. Well known examples of this which I’ve seen — although much more serious than arrows and stars! — include Andrew Wakefield (MMR maverick, much lauded as a “whistleblower”, later shown to be a hoaxer) and David Irving (maverick second world war historian, much lauded, later shown to be an anti-Semitic white supremacist.)
The keyhole stuff is objectively cool but how do I know the historical takes aren’t just “fake news” for nerds?
Which includes the record for pulling socks off pensioner's feet with your teeth.
But still, completely different worlds. The closest you get to that is "Barebow" and that's not Olympic but "Lancaster Archery" does a competition that includes a Barebow category. But even that allows for too much "modern" stuff (small stabilizer) and it's all modern recurves.
The draw weight of the bows Lars tends to use is around 15-20 pounds tops, really low draw weight, low power, for extremely fast stunt/trick shooting.
The draw on the bows I'd use to compete with were 30-35 pounds usually - at 18 meters with no sights and whatever low profile stabiliser/weight you could get away with, anything heavier is a waste of time.
Olympic style recurve shooters usually go around the same in draw weight, there's a tradeoff between better flight characteristics of heavier draw/heavier arrows and the amount of time you can sustain holding back that amount if weight/force.
As an aside, there is a fun niche market for "within the rules" bow weights in barebow - the main function of the weight is to pull the bow "down" out of recoil/the path of the arrow as fast as possible after release so it doesn't kick back and impact the arrows trajectory. I made a few prototype ones back then out of brass, steel, etc. Good fun.
Maybe he faked all the videos and got the Guinness book of world records to put a fake record on their website, but they doesn’t seem like the simplest explanation.
I presume so that any records held by themselves aren't called into question.
It may also seem "impossible" because you don't see Lars using what people might expect of an archer: a compound bow. You really don't need it. You can get incredibly accurate with a traditional bow, especially on the short distance you see in the video.
Source: I shoot traditional bows.
Smarter Every Day episodes that seem relevant:
Episode on archery w/ Byron Ferguson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Yp9SjCU5E
Episode on the Archer's Paradox is very interesting in this regard as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKMS2wO7WTI
Sincerely Lars Andersen
I imagine the archer made several real-time videos from several vantage points to prove no shenanigans.
He can just shoot 7 consecutive arrows at the back of a door, then leave the camera running as he shoots 7 consecutive arrows through the keyhole (with the tip starting out in the keyhole so he can't miss), and then composite the footage of the arrows going through the keyhole on to the footage of the arrows coming out of the bow.
The time gaps in between the arrows will be different, but nothing much is happening to the back of the door during this time, so you can just slow down or speed up the "back of door" footage during the dead time to line it up.
(I'm not saying he's done that -- I think it's real -- but that is how I would do it).
I'm not sure about the audio, but it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to fake the audio as well.
The real proof is all the other videos of Lars doing absolutely insane things.
The record is at https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/691706-mo..., though, and I do trust them to have checked that.
What you're doing is spreading FUD, which is far worse and erodes basic trust - a tenant that society depends on.
The point that Guinness witnessed it and that Lars is well known are great ones-- but there are many things people believe unquestionably which don't have evidence anywhere near as strong as that.
If you think trusting videos on the Internet is something that society depends on, we are fucked. Wow.
In this case, I'm fine to assume it could easily be faked, but wasn't.
It might be easy to fool me, but an expert archer would notice tons of this I’d miss if trying to fake it.
0: https://slate.com/culture/2019/08/john-oliver-last-week-toni...
An open door to anyone who wants to make records for the sake of fun and glory.
Closed door if your stated purpose is to belittle people or make controversy.
https://www.iphronline.org/turkmenistan-continued-repression...
Human rights track record bad? No problem! We're all having fun right?
Participate in TV show that mocks things? Ooh, no, we're the gate keeper of moral choices now.
I will work with a bad person to do a good thing. I will not work with a good person to do a bad thing. My participation is based on the morality of the thing that I am doing, not the other person's past or context .
To put it technically, the focus is on the first order action and effect.
This is in contrast to an increasingly popular moral assessment based on speculative second and third order effects.
There are accusations of forced participations in public spectacles in there, regardless of environmental conditions (ie: heat). If they'll do that for his birthday, would they do that for a world record attempt?
How much of a "good thing" is a world record attempt if the participants are compelled by the state and end up putting themselves at risk?
Further, the stated rationale from Guinness is "we are a family oriented brand". I can understand them not having done much research about a dictator initially, and maybe being unaware.
Only they haven't actually done anything consistent with that when it has been highlighted this individual is using their records as part of a propaganda machine in a very oppressive state. They in fact defended "their record holders".
Family oriented? Or profit oriented?
Your point that record setting can be secondarily used as a propaganda tool feeds directly into my point above about considerations of primary action versus secondary and tertiary actions.
By that logic we shouldn't help a dictator build a school or a hospital, because it could be used for propaganda.
This is what I reject
- Regime has a track record of human rights abuses - Company takes payment, sends out judge, stamps out record - Company takes a stance as "family values oriented" - Company is then subjected to press coverage pointing out they are working with human rights abuser. - The only public statement they have made is in support of their "record holders". Nothing revoked, revisited, reviewed.
If they had "family values", why wouldn't they do this upon learning about who they work with?
It's been a number of years, and they have done nothing.
This is not the consistent position worthy of respect you think it is.
You additionally keep going back to devil's advocate about choices you could make as an individual. You seem to decline to look further into what is happening between a regime lead by an individual and a for profit company, beyond holding them up as... admirable.
If you did, you would now know the individual in question does things like take political prisoners, expose the population to harm (mass participation record attempts during a pandemic), spend billions on world record attempt buildings, and more.
It's clear cut. The company involved is not achieving any tangible real world good. They are protecting someone who paid them. Building the world's biggest X is not providing any social value.
To pretend that a giant statue record is the same as a school or hospital is disingenuous.
I basically laid it all out in my first post.
Some people don't see it as wrong to work with bad people if you don't directly hurt anyone.
You obviously disagree.
More evidence that someone is bad doesn't change this.
But this is an attempt to obscure human rights atrocities, or at least using the money they gain from them to say "we hold a world record!".
However opening up trade with North Korea, Iran, Russia etc doesn’t seem a good way of handling the situation.
I would have no problem if the US collaborated on building hospitals with Russia at the same time we are also in conflict with them elsewhere. Support the good that you want to see in the world and others. Don't support the bad
;)
Some of them work the l&s in pretty well with the theme/topic of the video.