Well, the information has been out there for more than a decade, but this is a really cool way to represent the process. There are also a lot of faster ways to get past a $5 Master combination lock, so this method is really only useful if you want to deduce the combination of a lock -- for instance, if you found one on the side of the road, or you cared about not only opening it, but being able to open it in the future without leaving an obvious sign of breach such as would occur using bolt cutters or a hacksaw.

It's described in Feynman's biography 20 years ago - only for safes holding the designs of the atom bomb!

Not necessarily. It would take ~10-15 minutes of straight work to get this (more for your first few tries), so you can't really open a lock in a public place this way. On the other hand, it means you can pick up locks that the owner doesn't know the code to, and make them usable again by "recovering" the code.

If social engineering taught me anything it is not only could I spent 15 minutes at the lock, but I could even print this out and tape it to the wall in front of me. I forgot my lock combo and am trying to recover it, thats all. Someone might even come over and help :)

I've read about fascinating sociology experiment along those lines. A sociologist was planted on a busy street, obviously trying to open a car door lock with a bent wire. The car contained an expensive television. No one called the police, they just looked at him curiously and kept walking.

Of course no one bothered him, he didn't appear to be doing anything wrong.

That's the secret behind most social engineering.