The downside, as it were, is that mistakes would tend to hit you in the face. This beats the hell out of the juggling my grad-school housemates did.
Category Archives: Sports
It's Sports-Science Analogy Time, Again
Jon Huntsman, the lone voice of scientific sanity in the US Republican Presidential race
It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football. Why are these strange people running around after a sphere and kicking it to each other? What is the significance of the rectangular white box at the end? Why don’t they use their hands? Sure, we could posit some “laws” of “Association Football”, but that’s just a theory!
Similar to something I observed a while back. The difference here is that it’s in application to people who are vying to be leaders of a country, and to me it’s scary to think that the list is almost exclusively comprised of people who put ideology first, force the facts to fit and toss out anything that doesn’t.
The Bad Astronomer mentions this in reference to Rick Perry’s baffling “Galileo got outvoted for a spell” remark: Republican candidates, global warming, evolution, and reality. Galileo vs the church was not two scientific schools of thought duking it out, it was the suppression of science by holders of an ideological truth. Which is what is going on here, except that Perry got it exactly backwards.
Update: if you don’t want sports* analogies, here’s another.
Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.
*Though I’m sure there’s an xkcd cartoon where sex is a sport, and it does fulfill many of the basic requirements: physical activity, somebody possibly winning (I finished first. And you, not at all**) and I will never be mistaken for a professional practitioner.
** Which is why you shouldn’t keep score
Coordinate Transformation: Rocky the Flying Squirrel Edition
Sure, I want ideas for things to do with my own GoPro camera, but this is not one of the things I would do. He comes insanely close to “landing” partway through.
Feeling Jumpy
The Virtuosi – Physics in Sports: The Fosbury Flop
The Fosbury Flop came into the High Jumping scene in the 1968 Olympics, where Dick Fosbury used the technique to win the gold medal. The biggest difference between the Flop and previous methods is that the jumper goes over the bar upside down (facing the sky). This allows the jumper to bend their back so that their arms and legs drape below the bar
It is significant that Fosbury is not modeled as a sphere.
Dot Physics: World Record Blob Jump
I guess the best explanation for how it works is that it is like a giant see-saw. When people jump down on one side of the huge airbag, the other side goes up. If you consider small energy losses, then the work done by the bag in slowing the falling people down is the same work done on the launched person.
A Throw So Nice He Did it Twice
Home Field Advantage
Swing for the Fences. A discussion of Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
What is the source of home field advantage? Is it one of the usual suspects, or an influence of the crowds on referees?
Take any European football league in which all the teams play each other twice in a season, once at home and once away. Add up the total number of home victories and compare it to the total number of away victories. The ratio will be at least 60:40 in favour of the home sides (often it’s more: in the English Premier League home advantage currently runs at around 63 per cent, in Spain’s La Liga it’s 65 and Italy’s Serie A it’s 67). The advantage holds across almost every major sport, though exactly how big it is tends to vary. Fans are so used to this that they take it for granted their team is much more likely to win on its own turf. They also take it for granted that they know why – it’s because the home crowd is cheering the team on. But there is no evidence for this. In fact, despite a fair amount of research in the top sports science journals, there is no conclusive explanation of what makes teams play better at home. This is the real puzzle about home advantage: everyone knows it exists but no one knows why.
Passing Forward, Ever Forward, Until We Run Out of Bounds
“It’s A Simple Matter Of Physics!”
[I]t appears that people are puzzling on how a person who is running forward, then makes a pass backward, can result in a ball that is still moving “forward”.
The story is in reference to rugby but this is an issue in gridiron football as well. A runner laterals the ball, and there is a question of whether it was a forward pass. A debate ensues, and it’s really a matter of whose reference frame is to be used: the runner’s or the ground’s. I’d like to cite the NFL rules on this, but I can’t find them online — the NFL.com site has a “Digest of Rules” but I don’t want some pre-chewed interpretation. I’d like to see the actual wording to see if they define what a forward pass is.
After Seeing This You Will Want a Wind Tunnel in Your Home
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Coordinate Transformation, Tommy Roe Edition
it’s you girl makin’ it spin, you’re making me dizzy
Go-Pro Camera on a Hula-Hoop. Gotta get me one of these cameras.
Coordinate Transformation, BMX Edition
Triple backflip on a bike, including the helmetcam fotage.
New Zealand BMXer Jed Mildon has created action-sports history today by landing the world’s first Triple Backflip at the Unit T3 Mindtricks BMX Jam in Taupo, New Zealand.