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Comment by hi-v-rocknroll | Hacker News Reader

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While I am sure there are faked videos out there somewhere I have personally performed multiple non-fake multi-board breaks as have many other people. Generally there is one "trick" though: pencils or small wooden dowels are used to space the boards apart which makes the stack of boards weaker than if they were stacked without spacing. I'd argue this is an allowable aspect of showmanship in that five separated boards is cooler looking than two or three stacked without spacing!

People absolutely can break multiple bricks or boards, without fakery[0]. Or are you referring to specific videos?

[0] "Fakery" including scoring the wood. But multiple breaks usually takes some setup, such as putting small spacers between the pieces of whatever you're breaking. If you consider that fakery, then ... I guess?

i've definitely seen people breaking multiple boards by hand and foot without spacers or scoring the wood, repeatedly, up close, over years. i've done single-board break demos myself. the one piece of 'fakery' they did use was that they broke the wood parallel to its grain, not across the grain, and the individual boards were only ever "one inch" thick (which means less than one inch in the usa due to reasons), even if there was a stack of eight of them

the force required to break a beam is proportional to the square of its thickness, so breaking one two-inch board requires the same force as a stack of four one-inch boards

Scoring is absolutely fakery, and sometimes the boards are cut 90% of the way through on the hidden side (evidenced by clean breaks). So are spacers because "breaking X boards" means stacking the boards directly on top of each other, not using the leverage of displacement of breaking each one one at a time.

> "breaking X boards" means stacking the boards directly on top of each other

That's just your interpretation.

If a man breaks /n/ boards which were not pre-cut, then he broke /n/ boards.

Ethics > lawyering. If they can't break x boards unqualified, then they can't do it. If they can break x boards specially arranged or modified, sure, but that's called "cheating". It's a gimmick.

Let it be known that according to hi-v-rocknroll's personal code of ethics, it is cheating to break x boards if they are arranged in a specific fashion

That doesn't seem right.

Logically, the claim "I can break X boards" evaluates to true if there exists some configuration of X boards which that person can break. They aren't claiming "I can break X boards for all possible configurations of those boards".

No one can break even one board unqualified, because the board could be 20 inches thick and made of lignum vitae. Thus by your definition the phrase "can break a board" becomes useless.

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