Uploaded April 2013, over 4,000,000 views and copied several times. Apparently verified by Belarus police. Commenters say this was covered on CNN and ABC, those bastions of truth and journalistic integrity.
Comments are depressing. Skepticism, critical thinking, are very good things we agree. We're all for them. But then we reach a point where everything we see is fake and nothing bizarre is possible, and nobody ever does win any lottery ever. If stupid people doing stupid things never survived, then we'd all be geniuses by now this late in our evolution. If seemingly impossibly good luck never happened then we'd all be dead or never born. On the contrary, we are alive now and advanced as far as we have precisely because our ancestors did incredibly risky things and survived, and were amazingly lucky at times, and many times did die along the way doing careless things fraught with danger and still do die doing them (after procreating sufficiently to assure survival of our species)
But comments are depressing for the knee-jerkness of them. The comments that are automatically dismissive. The comments that chide, instinctively it seems, or at least habitually, for lack of critical assessment or for lack of education that fail themselves in their own critical assessment and are studded with errors that education is provided to fix, and how they devolve to off topic nationalism loaded with stereotyped preconceptions, often wrong, themselves media driven.
"Russians drivers are insane"
It's Belarus, not Russia. Big difference to a Russian but no difference at all to American commenters.
"Stupid Americans don't know the difference between Russian and Belarus."
That was an Australian commenter, not all stupid comments in English are American."
"Stupid t.v. watchers, haven't learned anything about gravity."
Did you mean Newton's three laws of motion? Those would seem as important as gravity. At lest the commenter got the Newton part right. Just enough education to be arrogant, to know about gravity. I too wonder about such things as, say, how fast a bullet drops when shot straight out of a gun, the same as if simply dropped, except calculated over distance depending on the caliber and force of the gun? Let's see, what are Newtons ideas again, relating to this motorcycle accident besides gravity?
1) a body in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state (like a planet) unless an external force acts on it (like smashing into a car that is also moving)
Something like that.
But here the motorcycle is accelerating and smashes into a car that is also moving, the two vehicles with different masses. The x factor is force.
2) Something about the relationship between mass (m) of an object and its acceleration (a) and force (F)
F= ma That's it.
Here we have two of them with differing masses and differing accelerations and then I suppose force is the unknown being challenged. Why the man didn't fly in front of the car and be killed if the video were real is the question. Rule 1 would take affect, a summersault would affect forward momentum somewhat, don't you think? The difference in accelerations and the difference in masses upon impact, and then deceleration, braking of the car after the hit, are the vectors to be charted. Luck, skill, and agility, bodily protection, are variables not reliably chartable.
3) Every reaction has equal and opposite reaction such as pool balls making it possible to position a ball in specific spot thus setting up the next shot.
Those three things taken together make it possible for the video to be real by a long shot, referring to firearms or pool again (but not photography), long shots actually are sometimes successful. My long shots are not often successful but long shots using firearms and pool cues do sometimes occur, thus snipers and pool sharks, and in this case, circus act gymnastic agility. One can assume for every 100 or so times this motorcycle crash trick is tried, 99 or so fail catastrophically, and then on the other hand the whole world sees half a dozen or so Russian (or Belarus or whatever) automobile video cam recordings of a meteorite exploding in the atmosphere, and what are the chances of that being recorded before insurance scams made Russian car video camcorders as necessary as insurance coverage? Zero, that's what. So this could happen and it is not so easily automatically dismissed as faked.
7 comments:
What makes it look staged is the rather sedate response of the trailing car driver. That's the platform for the cam.
He seems to anticipate the crash in that he slows and stops easily without hitting the dumped bike. No jagged edges in his response. Just a gradual deceleration and nice easy stop.
It isn't a staged accident. I say this as a motorcycle rider, ans as someone who has been around urban sportbike riders who do really, really stupid stuff.
In the cities (I'm speaking of American cities here, but everybody copies what we do) the ghetto yutes belong to motorcycle clubs that favor crotch rockets and high speed riding.
High speed riding requires a lot of sudden land changes to slip through openings between cars so as to keep riding fast. That's what the doof in the video did - he had committed to a lane change while driving maybe 2X the speed of the surrounding cars. A care moved into the space he was aiming for and kaboom, rear-ender.
The motorcycle rider didn't fly over the car because (a) sportbikes require that the rider ride in a leaned-forward, head-down position, and (b) the car had a flat butt.
I nearly had a heart attack one evening driving my car northbound on Chicago's Edens Expressway. I was about to make a lane change when I heard the buzzing of sportbike engines nearby. Stayed in my lane, and an instant later a group of six sportbikes flew past. I was going 60, they were going at least double that speed. Four passed in the lane I was moving into, and two passed on the other side, splitting the small distance between my car and the care in the next lane. Scared the hell out of me.
Belarus is not Russia, but Belarussians think of themselves mostly as Russian (ethnically, language, culture) so actually it is fair to give Americans a pass on confusing that distinction.
It is still an amazing video and I am glad the motorcycle driver survived it.
Belarus = White Russian!
If it were staged, how would you practice a trick like that? You'd be a paraplegic long before you mastered the trick.
Commenters do not believe it was staged, rather they believe it's completely fake, claymation and photoshopped, staged as in utterly fake. Many are unaware that Russians have camcorders mounted in their cars running continuously. They attack the dialogue, the rising to climax music, the apparent editing. They concentrate on film techniques that they know about and apply them to this. They allow no possibility for the bizarre and all possibility to being snookered.
It's a claymation? Well in that case, my compliments to Nick Park for a job well done.
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