[thom]

Juggling is one of hobbies with the highest ratios of being able to impress random people versus the actual effort you have to put in, and I generally find I never forget 3-ball stuff I learned as a kid. It's also as good as a long walk for getting you out of your head when needed.

Shout out to anyone that remembers the Mushy Pea juggling shop in Manchester many years ago, where I learned all sorts of circus skills.

[vikingerik]

Rubik's cubing is another. Most people here with enough logical aptitude to be programmers could probably learn a beginner method in a day or two. I'll pick up a cube anywhere I see one scrambled, solve it in a couple minutes, and then the last flourish is to leave it in the checkerboard pattern.

I also juggle, and the result of the combination is that approximately every single person on Facebook has posted to me the video about solving cubes while juggling them...

[crystal_revenge]

The biggest difference about Rubik's cubing is that once you have mastered 3x3x3, 4x4x4, and 5x5x5 (which is just a slight variant on 3x3x3) all subsequent cubes are just natural extensions of these. A 17x17x17 requires no new skills that aren't already mastered in a 5x5x5, it just takes more time. The nice part of about this is you can really blow peoples minds by pulling out an 11x11x11 cube and solving it at though it were nothing.

Even sided cubes are the hardest because they have issues with "parity" that are only uncovered near the end of the solve and can be quite tedious to fix (at least imho).

[LanceH]

Juggling 3 is a skill that is way easier than people think until they do it. But the very next question is will be, "how many can you juggle?" as they apparently think juggling 4 is just 33% more difficult than 3.

[vunderba]

It’s also fun that you can tweak it without the layperson even noticing the change in relative difficulty.

  Cascade pattern = easy difficulty  
  Shower pattern = normal difficulty  
  Box pattern = hard difficulty

As someone who loves to run their hands up and down in the piano in grand sweeping arpeggios, I'm a huge fan of patterns where the perceived difficulty is higher than the actual difficulty.

[Someone]

For those wondering: to juggle 4 balls, you either have to decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is in the air.

Unless you start throwing feathers or balloons, the latter requires you throw higher. That requires you to either spend more time launching them up (bad for the ‘decrease time between catching and throwing’) or use more force (bad for throwing accuracy.

Also, even assuming you juggle 4 balls keeping “time in hand” equal, you have to throw it higher by a factor of (4/3)². That’s almost 2.

And even if you manage to make those throws with the same accuracy in angles, the errors in location by the time you catch the balls scale by the same factor.

[thom]

Much easier to learn to juggle three clubs, and then swap them for knives. Really no harder than 3 balls but significantly more flashy.

[c22]

I've also found it to be a magical incantation to silence crying babies. Sometimes I'll quickly flash (juggle for one round) three random objects to shut up a baby in public and their parents don't even notice.