Navigating through a large crowd is not as easy as it would seem. Wired’s how-to wiki presents several tactics for moving fluidly through crowds. Apparently the main trick is to look down, watching the feet of the people around you.
To get on autopilot, pedestrian-style, look down at the feet of the people around you. The head and torso are lagging indicators and often give you bad information with regards to the speed and direction people are traveling. All that information is in the feet.
Don’t look directly forward. Your gaze is generally perpendicular to your body, usually 90 degrees. Reduce that angle, making it tighter as your space becomes more crowded.
Be aware of how crowded your “personal zone” is — use a 6-foot radius as a rule of thumb. Less than six people isn’t too crowded, so move as you would normally, but watch people’s feet as they enter your zone.
If there are six people within your zone, that’s a crowd and you should be looking down at all times. Gaze at the floor about 6 feet ahead.
If there are 10 or more people in your zone, look almost straight down, between 1 and 2 feet ahead. At this density, you will be in full defensive mode, moving forward overall but tacking and spurting, slowing down and speeding up as you go.
Evade, don’t invade. Change direction often to slip behind people rather than rushing to cut them off.
This is a simple trick from Instructables user Jake22 for quickly making secure handcuffs from a length of paracord.
Back during my military service we used to use these for POW’s. Zip tie handcuffs are much more common now.
As with all restraints – the object is to restrict the movement of a supervised detainee.
It works like a prusik knot in that it is a friction hitch, it really clamps down on the loops and even without the follow up square knot the friction makes it very difficult to loosen the loops.
39-year-old Amy Windom was tied to her bed after being robbed at gunpoint around midnight last Tuesday. The robber had taken various items from her home and stolen her car. Windom struggled to free herself for hours before, in a feat (no pun intended) of incredible dexterity, she used her toes to type a message to her boyfriend on her laptop.
“Around 4:15 or so, I realized that he had left my laptop at the foot of my bed,” Windom said.
“I flipped my legs over my head and turned off my alarm clock so my radio wouldn’t be blaring and block me from hearing anybody walking by that might be able to help me, and I was like, ‘wow, I guess I can do more than I thought with my feet,’” so I dragged my laptop over with my feet and I pried it open.”
[...]
She said she used one big toe as a mouse, and grasped the end of her power cord between the toes on her other foot, “because my big toe was too big to hit individual keys.”
She typed a message telling her boyfriend to call 911, and police arrived a few minutes later.
When an unnamed man found himself stranded in the woods of northern Saskatchewan, he came up with a clever method to signal for help. Knowing the power company would have to check on the downed lines, the man cut down several power poles with an axe he had on hand.
A man stranded in the bush in northern Saskatchewan was rescued last week after chopping down four power poles — knocking out electricity to surrounding communities.
The incident left several hundred people in Wollaston Lake and Hatchet Lake Denesuline Nation without power for more than 30 hours, but it paved the way for a man to be saved by a SaskPower crew.
[...]
“Essentially it was mission accomplished, because we got the call, we chartered a helicopter … and on Friday around noon we discovered him,” Parker said.
You just fell through thin ice. Struggling to get out, you keep a cool (no pun intended) head and remember the following article:
Roll away from the hole. Don’t stand up right away. The ice around the hole may be weak, so you want to distribute your weight over as much area as possible. Roll away from the hole or crawl on your belly until you are several feet from the hole. After that, you can crawl on your hands and knees until you are certain you are out of danger. Only then should you stand up.
Ever wanted to speak and sound intelligent, but make sure that no one knew where you were from? This might occur in a situation when you are working as an agent. The following can be very helpful for masking your origins and creating a intelligent facade.
[Y]ou get the accent in one of three ways:
Learn the accent on purpose (actors used to do that).
Grow up or live on both sides of the Atlantic (but that can lead to even stranger accents, like those of Loyd Grossman and Madonna).
Pick it up at a top boarding school in America before the 1960s.
[...]
Transatlantic English goes something like this:
Start with a mainstream American accent.
Drop your r’s at the end of words, like in “fear” and “winner”.
Say all your t’s as t’s not d’s (like in “water” and “butter”).
Use RP (British) vowels. So “dance” becomes “dahns”.
In Little Brother, a novel set in the future by Cory Doctorow, there are cameras that detect a person’s gait so that computer can track the person’s whereabouts. But in the present, all we have are regular video cameras and security teams. So how could changing your walk possible help you? Actually it can. As humans, we can almost instinctively tell who someone is just by watching them walk from a far. Our walk is very identifiable by not only friends, but strangers and computers.
There are many different ways to change your walk, including a change in sneakers, but stay away from methods that simply use mind over matter. Unfortunately, our walk is so instinctive, that moment we stop concentrating on it, it returns to your original strut. The best method, in my opinion, is inserting a pebble into your shoe or sock, which will manage the change in walks for you. This method was also discussed in Little Brother.
Holy crap. After reading this Lifehacker article, I realized how easy it would be to break into a hotel room solely guarded by one of those sliding locks. Check out the video below for a shock.
Blogger and lock-picker extraordinaire Barry Wels demonstrates how to unlock a sliding chain lock with a rubber band in the video above. In short, it’s a matter of attaching the rubber band to the lock and the door handle (it looks like a handle rather than a knob is important). Before you go asking why he doesn’t just slide the lock open with his hand (which I wondered briefly myself), remember: Chain locks work because you can’t slide it open with your hand. As you start sliding the lock toward open, the tension between the wall and the door will pull the door closed before you can slide it all the way open.
Whether you’re picking a lock, cracking a padlock, or hacking a Wi-Fi password, the goal is often less about knowing how to “break in” to something and more about understanding the security limitations a tool provides. The same holds true here. Also, who knows? It could come in handy next time little Timmy locks himself in the hotel room and won’t come out.
The Art of Manliness recently wrote about how to jump from a moving car. After rolling down the window to reduce wind pressure and opening the door, jump away from the car, then tuck and roll:
Tuck. Before you hit the ground, tuck your body into a ball. Bring your chin to your chest and bring your arms and legs close to your body. This will prevent your brain canister from hitting the ground and spilling its contents on the pavement. Also, it prepares your body to roll.
Roll. Hit the ground with your shoulder and roll away from traffic. Rolling lessens the impact when hitting the ground.
Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren’t bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won’t “open up and swallow your shattered body.”
With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don’t relax. This is not your landing pose.
Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver’s landing stance—feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips—best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls.