omenti

people beyond the numbers

 

"Track is nothing but numbers. A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach."

 

A quote from the head coach of the University of Oregon's track and field program.   They've picked some metrics that aren't applicable to sport which force young women to endanger themselves mentally and physically.  It turns out to be a way to turn a "fitness goal" into body shaming and performance on the field can suffer.   Here's a good piece on the subject.  Unfortunately Oregon isn't alone. 

 

Just what needs to be measured and how is it analyzed and interpreted.  In this case it's an outdated belief that thin people can run faster and jump higher.  It may be true to a point, but going past that point can reduce performance and lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport.   Sadly RED-S is common among female athletes - often the result of the athletes and their coaches not being aware of the last few decades of health and fitness in sports research.  They may be very good at measuring body fat percentages, but that's barking up the wrong tree.

 

People, it turns out, are complicated.  Traditionally medicine has been based on a biomedical model.  Simply speaking you measure something and react (treat medically or create a fitness goal in sports) based on the number and then repeat the steps.  For many medical conditions measurements and treatments are coarse enough that it works well enough - it's often all there is.  

 

In the past twenty years there's been a recognition that the mind is involved.The mind and body react together to what we forecast might happen in the near future.¹  Sometimes the mental component is small but it's can very large - particularly in competition.   To get a handle on the mental side athletes are often asked to keep detailed training diaries on how they feel at various times of the day .  A coach looks for changes and tries to adjust the training accordingly.   To go deeper here's been explosive growth in the use of sports psychologists in professional and D-I college sports.

 

There's also been an explosion in wearable fitness devices.  They can be great when the simple biomedical model applies.  Using them to improve fitness levels works for many people who aren't at peak performance levels.  Many paths can result in improved fitness and motivation is extremely important.  Professionals find them useful in some areas of training - checking heart rates during aerobics for example,  but don't find them terribly useful outside training.  

 

And back to the amateur.  You may have the twin goals of weight management and improved fitness.  Exercise is almost always great for health and probably worth the price of a wearable if you have motivation issues, but weight management is poorly dependent on exercise.  A device may tell you how many Calories of kilojoules you've used during a session, but sadly it's incorrect to assume that's tied to how much you eat.  Metabolism is very complex and the body and mind adjust it to match new conditions.  So you lose weight at first, but then it comes back even though you're exercising and eating the same.   There are good evolutionary reasons for this that we've abundanced our way out of.

 

Assume you have a device that can measure a few metrics that are well-understood.  How the information is used can be tricky.  We're seeing a lot of amateur mistakes with date analysis in the pandemic - and often by people who should know better.  It's common in fitness training and undoubtedly in many fields.   My friend Greg Blonder put together two pieces of information that presented together are misleading.

 

You plot the amount of ketchup on the horizontal axis, and Tastiness on the vertical.
A hamburger is very desirable with a little ketchup, ever more so slathered. Liver is highly detested, but LOTS of ketchup helps. So more ketchup is better for either meal, but worse overall. The undesirability of liver skews the results when you aggregate data.  

 

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¹ In the literature the mind-body models are sometimes called anticipatory regulation or predictive processing.  Journalist Mike Finch and sports scientists Ross Tucker and John Kiely talk about this and a few other training issues associated with elite sport in episode 26 Tucker's The Real Science of Sport podcast.  If you have any interest in sports science this is one of the best podcasts around. 

 

 

how electrical energy moves..

a quick minipost

Most people don't understand how electric energy flows until they take and Electricity and Magnetism class in college. I've found teaching it without math to be challenging unless your good at drawing or some other type of visualization..    Derek Muller does an excellent job without having to resort to the math! 

 

Maxwell's equations are often the first place a physics student has the wind knocked out of them by sheer beauty. 

diverted imagineering

Sometimes when it was really dark - those clear moonless night where the Milky Way stood out - Brian and I would load the binoculars and telescope into my parent's station wagon and either go East on Highwood Road or North on the Bootlegger Trail past Benton Lake to get away from the town lights.  It could be impressively dark.  The kind of dark where the ground disappeared.  We covered a low powered flashlight with red plastic.  Dim red light didn't damage your night vision as much as white light did.   But you could do a lot better.

 

When you're in a very dark place try using your rod-based vision.   Give your eyes at least ten minutes to begin to adapt - twenty minutes will be even better.  You won't see any colors, but your eyes will be somewhere between one thousand and ten thousands times more sensitive to light.  You can navigate with just the light from the Milky Way. 

 

A friend read something about the art of defamiliarizing yourself to gain a new perspective.  Artists might concentrate on the empty space between objects.  A few years ago Frans Blok played with geography by inverting elevations on a map of the Earth.  Everest became the deepest trench in an ocean and the Marianas Trench became the highest peak.  He tweaked place names and came up with something that makes you think. 

 

People noted for artistic creativity often do it.  Just change something to see what you're working on from a different perspective. Haruki Murakami wrote rough drafts in English and then translated back into his native Japanese. Margaret Atwood likes to change an opening sentence or paragraph to hunt for new perspectives.  She uses the example of a change to Little Red Riding Hood where the first sentence becomes: "It was dark inside the wolf." Some writers pin segments of what they're working on to a wall and ponder how the flow changes if you move them around.  Some film people use storyboarding in the same way.   Artists play with negative space - the space between the physical subjects in their paintings and sculptures.   A cute trick some musicians use is to invert music. There are even pianos where the keys are arranged backwards for this kind of play.  

 

Awhile back I taught an intro physics course to non-STEM majors. Hoping to make it a bit more interesting I found examples in sports.  I think all of us learned something.  At one point we were playing with the idea of what a sport would be like on a different world.  Different atmosphere and different gravity  and more unusual possibilities like cartoon physics.  We found many of our assumptions broke. We came to a more fundamental question - what makes a sport interesting on Earth.   Then how could you modify existing sports or invent new ones.  Why current rules of sports are what they are?  How deeply are they based in physics?  It even led to a guest lecture by a neurologist who seemed delighted by the play. 

 

Trying to explain a central concept to someone with your background is both difficult and useful.  Wired had a fascinating series of videos on the theme.   My thesis advisor required his students to explain their work in a period to high school students.  One of the most difficult things I've tried and it completely changed my thinking about teaching. 

 

 

If you're stuck on a particular problem sometimes it's useful to try something else - perhaps something very different.   Problem solving by singing in the shower, running, or doing something else physical is real for some people.  

 

I usually find it's best to change one thing and think about what happens as a result.   find it incredibly useful to talk with folks who do very different things - musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, business people, athletes and so on.  Sometimes you get involved in a project that leads to a bit of insight that may seem completely unrelated.  Last year I found some thinking on the aerodynamics of spinning volleyballs led to thinking about something curious about neutron stars.   Through that interaction I learned a bit about the "chess" of a sport with just two players on a side and that led to some questions for a neurologist.   

 

Finally it's a fundamental part of humor..  So why not end with a bad joke?

 

A priest, a rabbit and a minister walk into a bar. The priest and minister both order a beer, but the rabbit looks confused.  The bartender asks the rabbit "what'll ya have? "The rabbit says "I dunno. I'm only here because of autocorrect."