‘Bird Man’ Hoaxster Comes Clean on Dutch Television
wired.com
wired.com
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.
For crying out loud, just go skydiving already.
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.
I think all he succeeded in doing was increasing peoples cynicism. Next time you see an amazing video, your doubt will be that little bit more compounded thanks to 'Human Birdwings'
Honestly, I'm not sure this is a Bad Thing. Too many people seem prone to believe things that are presented to them in the media. A little more critical thinking/critical analysis skills in the general population wouldn't be the worst thing...
The problem i have with him is the same problem that i have with all liars. Namely, that the world is such an interesting and fascinating place, that wasting time on hoaxes and stupid "ha ha! i tricked you!" sorts of media is largely pointless.
This dude can claim that his effort was really an "experiment" about online media and how to tell a story, but frankly, I think that's bullshit. This guy isn't doing research about what it takes a viral video to study viral videos so that society might better understand how it is that information is passed between members of a network (and there are folks who study this sort of thing).
This dude is just trying to make a project of his go viral. I really see very little distinction between this project and any other sort of fame-whoring, save for the amount of effort put in.
So, please tell me if you can, why this hoax is an improvement, or even a useful fiction in the face of real science/engineering awesomeness like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E77j1imdhQ
I have a problem with artists needling society solely because they can.
As a work of inspiration/aspiration, human bird wings is rather underwhelming.
Last I checked the dream of personal human flight is well-entrenched. There's no shortage of interest in jetpacks, personal helicopter backpacks and even that water-powered 'jetpack' thing; to say nothing of the legit powered-glider sorts of projects.
I'm pretty sure no-one needed this hoax to 'dream'.
Trying to drape a hoax in a desire to 'inspire' rings hollow to me. It sounds like more shameless self-promotion from someone who set out to get nothing but attention.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The description alone does not invalidate this. The concept doesn't invalidate it. If a science editor did dismiss this out of hand (without viewing the video), then I'd argue that they'd be far more unqualified to do their job than if they didn't.
The kinds of problems you have to deal with to make something like this aren't really documented on the guys website. That's a fairly good indicator that they've not actually done it. They came up with a fairly believable design concept (although never go into detail), but the control systems required to turn a man flapping their arm with accelerometers into something that can fly are very non-trivial.
There are a number of challenges you'd have to face before you could make something like this for real. Most would be control and aerodynamic related. Once you start flapping wings, things get very complicated very quickly. Most ornithopters that have been flown in the past have used fairly simple wing designs coupled with quite conventional airframe construction. The stability considerations for the kind of wing that this guy claimed to have made would be pretty horrendous. We've made big advances in active stability recently though, and the hardware required is very much a commodity now.
I added in my comment that I hadn't originally noticed the powered element of it, but like I say, even then you should assume that it's fake, because which is more likely: A guy invented an exoskeleton capable of powering an ornithopter, and kept it under wraps until it was finished, or that a guy faked the video, something for which there is ample precedent?
So as a journalist you should assume that it's fake. A tiny bit of research would reveal the total lack of detail and backstory, confirming this view.
ah common, it's the internet trashiest sites, run by a bunch of hipsters, who never really seem to know what they are talking about. Okay maybe that's to harsh, but it doesn't really surprise me they fell for that.
"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
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."
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.
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 ;)
Actually, Lithium-Polymer battery packs capable of a sustained output in excess of 2kW weigh only a few pounds.
Be warned, it's pretty graphic stuff.
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.
Besides, why bother with flapping when you can soar and thermal? ;)
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.
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.
if you disagree with the content, how about your respond instead?
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?