omenti

a thanksgiving for tiny asymmetries

Soon American Thanksgiving arrives and a change to note a few things I'm thankful for. This year I'll pick two examples that celebrate tiny asymmetries in nature: our existence and women's sports.

 

First the universe as we know it.  There are several asymmetries in physics that allow us to exist. Two important ones are the amount of antimatter and matter produced in the very early universe and the mass difference between up and down quarks.  The matter-antimatter imbalance is easy to think about, but is still one of those fundamental unsolved problems.  During the first fractions of a second after everything started particle-anti-particle pairs would be popping in and out of existence at a furious rate. As the universe expanded all that would be left would be pure energy.  But something interesting happened.  This oscillation slightly favored these oscillating particles to decay as matter particles than antimatter.  The asymmetry isn't huge - a part in a billion or so - but we wouldn't be here without it.  There are a number of conjectures about the mechanism, but nothing solid.

 

So the early universe favored matter. Things like electrons and quarks that make up atoms.  The neutron has two down and one up quark, the proton two up and one down.¹ It turns out down quarks are slightly more massive than up quarks.  That means the neutron is more massive - about a tenth of a percent than the proton.  On its own the neutron is unstable, decaying into a proton, electron and antineutrino in about fifteen minutes.  If the proton was more massive it could decay into a neutron, positron and neutrino.  In the heavier proton universe everything would quickly be just neutrons, electrons and neutrinos..  It would be impossible for atoms to form ..  no stars, no planets, no us..

 

What about the radioactive free neutrons in our universe?  There's the strong interaction - an interaction resulting from another asymmetry that binds neutrons and protons together at very close ranges. The binding energy prevents the neutron from decaying so we can have atoms that are more complex than hydrogen..

 

So onto another asymmetry that occurred over thirteen billion years from the beginning - the genetic difference between males and females. Within any given species the differences are very small.  They turn out to be profound.  Male and female humans have some important differences that can be described as a small asymmetry.  This results in two sexes (with some mostly rare differences).  There are also a number of genders which aren't related to the genetic asymmetry.  Some societies tend equate sex and gender but others, like some North American First Nation Peoples, recognize well over a dozen.  I'm solidly with the later group and believe there shouldn't be unfair discrimination.   

 

This is where Title IX is important.  A major result of the law was an explosive growth in women's sports in the US. Now fifty years in, the strength of women's sport in American schools has fundamentally changed women's sports globally.  Women's sport should be protected category. Biological males receive enormous physical advantages during puberty largely from the hormone testosterone.  Biological males that have their testosterone levels reduced to near zero after puberty still have almost all the performance advantage (70 to well over 90 percent) an untreated biological male would have. 

 

A good friend is an Olympian and I've become more familiar with some parts of elite women's sport. A number of biological males are declaring themselves to be trans women.² While this may or may not be entirely gender identification, these biological males have an advantage over biological females in the vast majority of sports.  In sport there three fundamentals people talk about:  safety, fairness and inclusivity.  Using that order is protective of biological females. Unfortunately some sports and people argue inclusivity and remove fairness and safety.³ The result has been second rate biologically male athletes denying biologically female athletes medals and scholarships and, in some cases, increased injury rates.  There's also some intimidation from sponsors to prevent women from speaking up.  

 

But in each category - male and female -you can find what makes sport exciting.

 

 

Asymmetries are why we're here.  They can also produce social challenges.

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¹ I've taken some license here:-)

² Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has made several podcasts on this that make a good introduction to the biology. The first 35 minutes or so of this podcast episode offer one of the best explanations of the Caster Semenya affair. 

³ Some argue that there are women taller and stronger than many men.  The argument doesn't hold water. Consider age and weight categories in many sports. They exist to promote fairness and safety. While Sarah stands 196 cm and can lift more than twice her body weight, elite male volleyball players have a strong physical advantage over her.   There are male and female distributions for height, weight, strength, lung capacity, blood flow, endurance, etc.   In fact, in the longest ultra endurance events - ultra-marthons over 100 miles - women turn out to have an endurance advantage that becomes more significant by 150 miles. If these became popular there should probably be different categories for biological males and biological females. 

And on the game I know.  Male and female volleyball at the elite level have developed different strategies and tactics as a result of the physical differences.  In my mind the women's game involves more finesse, tactics and strategy, while the men's game is more powerful. 

 

gains and loses - should we have a choice?

In the mid 70s a young researcher at Waterloo named Janet Starkes had an insight that changed ideas about why good athletes are good.  It led to a a good deal of work on the acquisition of expertise. She had been a volleyball player as an undergrad and her familiarity with the sport led to her testing perceptual cognitive skills of volleyball players.  In the process she invented the occlusion test.    She showed players on the Canadian National Team brief flashes - sixteen thousandths of a second - of volleyball matches.  Some had the ball in the frame while it had just exited the frame in others.  The players had to say if the ball was visible or not.  Unskilled observers find the task is impossible - all you see is a brief flash of light.  Even studying the image for longer is difficult as the there's a confusion of visual information.  

 

The players were able to correctly score the images at a much greater rate than chance.  A few saw even more.  In indoor volleyball the setter is the person who directs how the play will proceed.   Good setters have what is often called court sense. Elite players seem to know where the players who are important to the developing play are and how they're moving.  This court sense has been measured in elite players in other sports like basketball, soccer, hockey, and cricket.

 

The occlusion experiments  have been repeated in sports like tennis and baseball to understand when a player knows what the near future may bring. They explain why Jenny Finch was able to strike out the best major league baseball players. They didn't understand her pitch and how the ball was moving - even though it was only traveling at 60 to 70 miles per hour. They were reduced to reacting to the moving ball - something that doesn't work in baseball. The elite players generally make their decisions on how to hit the ball around the time the pitcher releases it - sometimes just before.  Much of the information they use comes from observing motions that lead up to and are part of the pitch.  

 

Experiments with chess players show elite players can understand the board and how play is proceeding in a very short time even though, in theory, there are an enormous number of potential moves ahead.  When experimenters then displayed images of boards with impossible or extremely unlikely arrangements of pieces, the elites were reduced to the level of raw beginners.  Just like the major league baseball players facing Jenny Finch.   The view is the chess players and elite athletes break information down into something of a mental shorthand - "chucks" of information.  When they are presented with a chunk or series of chunks they're familiar with they know, usually without thinking,  how to proceed.  

 

The brain is "plastic."  It takes a good deal of time and effort to develop relevant neural libraries of these chunks..  sometimes a childhood of playing and learning at a variety of levels in many activities.  London cabbies are  interesting example.  It may not be the case now with GPS navigation, but cabbies had to pass an extremely difficult test of their knowledge of the city's streets that usually requires over a year of study. MRI scans show the cab drivers have a much larger portion of their hippocampus - an enlargement that came from that study.  Musicians show enlarged regions as do people who learn multiple languages at an early age.   It turns out early music and language skills are useful for certain types of reasoning, so perhaps it's good to encourage these skills.  Or maybe not.  

 

What does it mean when we don't develop certain mental skills - when we don't build the pathways.  It's clear I'll never play, or even react to volleyball at an elite level..  the wiring isn't there even if I had the physical skills.   But what if I had never learned how to navigate using maps and looking for signs in nature where I don't have maps.  There's some evidence those skills are very useful for grappling with geometry - particularly the more abstract kind math and physics majors see in college.  Will an over reliance on GPS damage certain types of abstract thinking?  Does it matter?  

 

As various forms of "AI" take over tasks will it free us for other forms of thinking, or will it damage our ability to excel in some areas?  It's speculation at this point, but given how difficult it is to get good at something and  that getting good at one thing can be useful in other areas, it strikes me as an interesting area of study.  Some technologies may enhance, others may handicap. 

 

And in some areas this chunking of information can get you into trouble when a novel approach is called for.  That's when broad and seemingly unrelated connections become important.  The folks who excel at this are deep enough library of chunks that they recognize this takes something else and manage to patch together something novel.    But that's another story.

 

 

 

when there is elsewhere

There haven't been any extensive use reports of the Apple Vision Pro, but most of the people who had a brief introduction walked away impressed giving a sense that this really is something new.  It's spendy by many measures, but supplies will apparently be heavily constrained as some components are both expensive and very low yield. But with its visual and sound field reconstruction capabilities, one set of use cases may involve real-time remote presence.  A court-side seat at a NBA game or something from a Taylor Swift concert come to mind.

 

But there are questions. Horace is one of the best Apple analysts out there as well as an all-around really smart guy. (If you're interested in tech or micromobility, you need to follow his podcasts, posts and live events.) He recently posted some thoughts on the value of remote presence and how it might be one of the  drivers for Apple's new device.  I would be really surprised if folks at Apple aren't thinking along these lines.

 

I sent a note to him that offered a little pushback that wasn't really pushback..  it's more that value of being there varies a lot and the same for quality of experience.  Sports and music are two very interesting cases.

 

Last night an indoor women's volleyball match between Nebraska and Oklahoma set the attendance record for any women's sporting event.  Normally NCAA games are held indoors in places that rarely seat more than 8,000.  High school and college women's volleyball has the greatest participation of any women's team sport in the US.  This wasn't an important match - Nebraska has a much higher ranking than Oklahoma and it's preseason, but it's an event.  There's a strong passion is that part of the country - one of you is well aware of it.¹ So 92,003 paying fans filled more than the seats.. about 10,000 had to stand as the football stadium was too small.  The view of action was probably terrible for most of the fans, but that wasn't the point.  All of those people in the same place sharing the same passion and seeing it roll out at the same time.

Here's the walkout video for a sense of scale

I'm a beach volleyball fan and regularly find myself waking up at two or three in the morning to follow a match with a player I know or a team I care about on the other side planet. The streaming is sometimes poor and costs $80 a year. Tickets aren't terribly expensive, but travel is so I haven't been to a large number of events.  The sport is extremely friendly, probably because there isn't much money in it, and talking to players and other spectators is at least half of it..  going to dinner with a couple of gold medalists isn't exactly an everyday event.  I wanted to go to Tokyo and had been invited as a friend of a Canadian team, but Covid.  Perhaps Paris. 

 

The BBC had a nice piece on why people care about games. It's a short and worthwhile listen.

 

So would I use an Apple Vision Pro if a steam that offered a court side view with good commentary existed?  Sure!  Well - maybe. How much would I pay?  That's an interesting question.  It would largely rest on how much the streaming experience was improved. It can't replace the physical experience of being part of an event.  It's interesting that American soccer (football to the rest of the world) sometimes go to bars to find a critical mass of likeminded fans when their team is playing.  And there are Super Bowl parties.  For a couple of hours what people do for a living, religion, political  views and so on don't matter.  There's a distributed group bonding.  Do products like the Apple Vision Pro augment or replace that form of interaction?  I don't think so, but I don't have a working crystal ball.

 

And there's music. These days it mostly falls into live streaming, on demand streaming, in person concerts and a small (but growing again) amount of collecting physical media.  The streaming experiences aren't great, but they're cheap with large (for popular genres) catalogs.²  I prefer small live music events. Not only do the musicians connect with each other and the audience, but the audience often connects with the musicians and that can be magical. Depending on the event the interactions within the audience can be important..  Taylor Swift concerts are a prime example, but many other musicians have similar or better "magic", albeit at a smaller scale. (I'd offer Yo-Yo Ma as an example).   

 

There's a scale for each person and each event on the importance of various aspects of these different takes on interaction and consumption. Radio and then television changed the values as did the expansion and, in some cases, contraction of live events. Streaming has made a difference, but it has so many rough edges.  I suspect Apple's new product may offer something very different that will once again bring some change, but probably not for some time.  I'm guessing we'll have a better idea around the time Apple Vision Pro 3 or 4 is announced, You'll know it when you can get NBA games through Apple Vision Pro + service for $20 a month:-)

 

But if anyone wants my reaction next Spring, just buy one for me and I'll review it:-)

 

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¹ Nebraska had two legendary players in the 2000 → 2010 era.  Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan.  Here's Sarah's college record  and when her number was retired.  Both of them went on to illustrious indoor careers overseas and Jordan has been a key player on the US Olympic Team.  Sarah eventually switched to beach volleyball has had many honors including world champion and two time Olympian.  One of Sarah's awards was the Honda Cup in 2007  - the best college female athlete in any sport that year.  Shortly before the Tokyo Olympics the organization that presented the award interviewed her as part of their podcast series.

² In 1994 two of us probably hold the first time record for streaming non-trivial, live music at reasonable quality over the Internet.  A Utah Phillips concert from the Folk Project in New Jersey at 96 kbps stereo by bonded ISDN lines to a hub in Princeton where it went to the Net where a few people with AAC players could listen.  So I guess I'm familiar with streaming.  It was good, though (for those of you who get the reference:-)

 

 

magnets and a most dramatic moment

The opening ceremony of each Olympic game is filled with pageantry and sometimes, with the lighting of the cauldron, drama.  In my mind the most electrifying occured in the 1992 Barcelona games when Paralympian Antonio Rebollo performed some serious diablerie. 

Across the ocean in New Providence, New Jersey David and Mary watched the scene on a small black and white television as they shared pedaling duties.  David was pedaling at the time and gasped.  Fortunately there was a flywheel.

 

Their parents didn't allow television in the home, but both of them had been involved in competitive kayak and canoe events.  Lynn had been an alternate for the Montreal Olympics.  Introducing Mary and David to the Olympics was a good idea, but Al decided to make it educational. The kids would be given an exercise bike, a generator, access to a television and help from their mechanical engineer father and mathematician mother.  They had a few weeks to work things out.

 

When the the friction wheel generator was finally adjusted and working, they were shown how much power they produced and how much power various televisions used.  A twelve year old could keep a small color set going for a short time, but that was it.  They wisely chose the black and white set.  Through trial and error they ended up with a bicycle chain transmission and abandoned the exercise bike for one of their own on a homemade stand. They could now produce nearly twice the power for the same amount of perceived work.  A flywheel was added to make everything smoother.   They had something by the opening ceremony and the kids spelled each other off and developed an amazing sense of how long the commercials lasted.  They saw the torch lighting.¹

 

It's too bad they had a standard generator.  Something with better magnets would have had increased efficiency.  Not enough to move them into a color set (if they were a few years older and more athletic they probably could have managed), but certainly a better experience.  The strength of the magnetic field in a generator or motor is centrally important.  The strongest fields come from superconducting magnets, but they need to be cooled to near absolute zero rendering them impractical for most applications.

 

Electric vehicles use either induction or permanent magnet motors.  The permanent magnet designs tend to be lighter and are more efficient.²   There's a rub.  You're trying to optimize cost and magnetic field strength (among other things).  Rare earths like neodymium work much better than the cheaper ferrite-based magnets and have generally taken over the medium and high end automotive market.³ 

 

The problem with rare earth materials isn't that they're rare .. they fairly comment.  They are, however, unevenly distributed and difficult and toxic to mine and process.  Most of the active mining and processing is in China and it's an environmental disaster.  The US had a single mine in California in the fifties.  Since then it's had t an up and down existence including being closed for economic and environmental reasons.  With the interest in EVs it's back in operation again  and the US has gone from 0% of the world's production of neodymium to about 15% in about seven years.  In theory the mining and processing and safer and less toxic than the Chinese effort. Production should increase in the future.  The US is also largely unexplored - serious mineral exploration has only just resumed after a 60 year hiatus. 

 

The higher cost has some companies, notably Tesla, talking about going to ferrite permanent magnets.  They'd be heavier, less efficient, but would be cheaper and may be the core of lower-end vehicles.  Another alternative is to use a more efficient vehicle.  Electric bicycles and other micromobility solutions use small motors.  You can build 50 to 200 electric bike motors with the materials from one Tesla-class motor.  Not only that these vehicles are very practical for the short trips that dominate much of our mobility needs.  Sadly some areas have saddled themselves with transportation infrastructures that encourage inefficiency.

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¹ Mary continued in the families sport tradition and went to Princeton on a fencing scholarship.  She found she was interested in aeronautical engineering and went on for a Ph.D.  I heard she had something to do with the rotor design on the Ingenuity helicopter currently flying on Mars. 

² There are often questions about how permanent magnets work.  Most people have seen electromagnetic induction in school.  A current flows if you move a magnet in a coil of wire and a current through a wire produces a magnetic field.  Permanent magnets are more difficult to talk about .. I've done it at least once, but this short video is a nice intro.

 

³ There are other rare-earth based magnets, but a neodymium alloy is the most common.  It's an allow of neodymium, iron and boron - Nd₂Fe₁₄B - that forms a crystalline structure.  They have widespread use outside of EVs.. GM and Sumitomo Metals independently developed them about 40 years ago to get away from much more expensive and brittle samarium–cobalt magnets.

There's a lot of talk about tetrataenite (an iron-nickel structure) permanent magnets.  In theory they have better magnetic characteristics than neodymium alloys and should be much cheaper, but they're off in the future.  If they happen, expect some unhappy rare earth mining companies. 

 

manpo-kei, gold plated teaspoons and home runs

A friend had been struggling to find regular physical activity for a few years.  She complained enough about a lack of motivation that her brother gave her a low-end Fitbit for Christmas.  Somehow the pedometer function clicked for her.  Being able to see the numbers of steps was as motivating for her as filling in circles on an Apple Watch is for other people.  On top of this she'd heard about the magic 10,000 step number.  Initially the goal was beyond her, but she was motivated and within a couple of weeks she was there.  She's kept it up and regularly does 15,000 a day along with increasing her speed.  Her blood pressure is down from last year's number and she feels healthier.

 

In the 60s a Japanese company marketed a pedometer known as the Manpo-kei - which translates to the ten thousand step meter.  The pedometer became a fad and somehow the 10,000 step goal was enshrined in popular culture.  There's no reason why the number means anything other than being something like five miles of walking for most people.  That's over an hour of walking and good exercise. So people who aim for the number are getting a good benefit because the general direction of walking a lot is healthy rather than the number being the "right" target. 

 

The NY Times recently ran an article on some inaccuracies in smart watches.  It doesn't surprise me.  I've been around Olympic programs and athletes for a few years and know some horror stories about the over-reliance of data when you don't know it's accuracy or the context of the measurement or its use.  Like anything else with data, you need to know why, what and how you're measuring, manipulating, and finally interpreting and using the information.  In sport that turns out to be difficult.  There are a number of interesting approaches to deal with the issues, but that's another post. 

 

The NY Times piece and elite training experience suggest broad trends over time are much more important than local accuracy and precision  If you're trying to improve your fitness level or play amateur level sports, the motivation from a smartwatch can make a big difference.  If you're an elite athlete there are many other things to consider and it's likely you're taking advantage of them.

 

The notion of broad trend over local accuracy has utility in many areas.  One that frustrates me is building  carbon dioxide removal technology.  It's something of a delaying tactic being cheerleaded by the petrochemical and coal industries.  In reality it's extremely expensive, requires a large amount of energy and diverts funding from much more effective technologies and behaviors.  Currently four 1 million ton  class plants are on the drawing board.  With luck each could remove a million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 or so with a projected cost of about a billion dollars each.  So how much of an impact is that?

 

A million tons of carbon dioxide is about 1/40,000 of current yearly emissions.  That's roughly the same ratio as a teaspoon to a bathtub full of water.  Imagine running the tub and in the time it takes to fill it, you can remove a teaspoon of water.  The bathtub keeps running..  in the time another tub of water comes out of the spigot, you can remove a second teaspoon.  And then a third, forth and so on.  

 

We currently have many deployable technologies and behaviors that will turn the tap down much more than a teaspoon worth for far less money.  When we're finally down to the point where we're only putting a gallon or so of water into the tub each year, then it might make sense to deploy a number of teaspoons to make a difference for where it's difficult to turn the tap (aviation and shipping for example) 

 

Spend some money and talent learning how to improve the process, but don't count on it in the near term as it isn't, and will never be,  a silver bullet.  Nothing it.  all we can hope for is silver buckshot and using as much as we can possibly afford.  It makes sense to use the buckshot with the greatest cost/benefit ratio - things like wind, solar, better power grids, efficient transportation (full sized EVs don't count!), and any number of energy thrifty behaviors. 

 

And finally home runs and climate change.  Recently a paper made the major news outlets with projections that climate change will have an impact on Major League Baseball home runs: "Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming."  The paper is poorly done .. basically a sensitivity analysis based on a single variable. I won't give it the credibility of a link.  Something that doesn't work in the real world with something as complex as baseball.  I have a some expertise in the fluid dynamics of balls flying through the air and would argue the effect is small.  In fact they note the same thing, but word the conclusion to make it appear there is an effect and climate change impacts everything.  This is pure clickbait for news organizations and probably has the impact of diverting attention from much more serious issues associated with global warming.  It's trivial to see the home run impact is insignificant, but a poorly done analysis can lead to fuzzy thinking and even harm.

 

the other dick fosbury

A few years ago I was having fun of  thinking about the fluid dynamics of a ball moving through the air.  The main focus was  beach volleyball, but also several other sports that use roughly spherical balls. Of these, the two with the most curious motions are table tennis and beach volleyball.   It came as a surprise as soccer (football in most of the world) has dramatic movements and baseball can be tricky, but they're not in the league of these two other sports.  People found it fun so I decided expand it into a college level class - a one semester physics of sport course for non-majors.

 

It was a very interactive affair,.  After a few weeks a few coaches and their assistants turned up,  offering things to think about.  After going through the Fosbury flop, one of the track and field coaches mentioned there had been a similar innovation in long jump, but it had been outlawed as too dangerous.  He pointed out you lose a lot of energy at takeoff by leaning back at takeoff.  The innovation was to halt the loss doing a forward somersault.  He couldn't remember the name of the athlete who did it, but thought it was in the mid 70s with World Athletics quickly banning it.

 

That evening I took pencil to paper and came to the conclusion it could increase distance traveled by as much as ten percent.  Ten percent is a change in sport where people will try crazy things for fractions of a percent.  Eventually around I found the athlete - a student from New Zealand who would have had the world record on his first attempt if he had slightly better form.  There were a few still images, but no video.  

 

With the recent passing and celebration of the life of Dick Fosbury I decided to look again.  Two years ago  an interview with a video of the jump was posted.  Long jump records would probably be over ten meters if it hadn't been banned.  The physics is simple - the leap was realizing you didn't have to lean back.

fairness, inclusivity, safety and social convention

There's so much that isn't fair in this world, but most competitive sports make an attempt to provide a reasonably level playing field through the establishment and enforcement of rules and categories.  Rules vary from sport to sport but some constants are the elimination of performance enhancing drugs, a degree of safety for participants, and the creation of categories.  Some sports allow a certain amount of violence or danger balancing what the fans and athletes want vs modifications to the rules that might make the sport less desirable.  In other words there's a social convention.  Sometimes that social convention changes after serious injuries or deaths.  Positive change has come in world rugby in the past few years, but other sports are more resistant to change.

 

More recently fairness and inclusivity have come into play.  Categories exist to prevent grossly unfair contests.  You don't want a wrestler up against someone half their weight.   Twenty year olds don't compete with ten year olds or seventy year olds. Men and women usually are have categories of their own in most sports.  And para-athletes generally have separate competitions with a dizzying set of subcategories to allow fairness given a wide range of capabilities.  Fairness comes first in these, but it allows inclusivity to play and potentially succeed in a given sport.   But like so much else in the world there's change.

 

South African Oscar Pistorius became a below-the-knee amputee in both legs as a child due to a congenital defect.  Using racing blades, he became a good sprinter - an Olympic class sprinter.  There was controversy about how much of his performance came from him and how much from the blades?  Are blades as good as or better than real lower legs?    He was charismatic and there was a large amount of social pressure that running should be inclusive.   A few calculations were done early on followed by a few real tests with this unusual subject.  Some of the early results indicated the energy return from the carbon-fibre blades was the same as the achilles tendon - in other words no advantage.  That was the message the public received. The more careful work that followed has shown he had a significant advantage from lower contact time with the ground and added leg length - enough that 'he was probably a good, but not elite runner turning in performances well beyond his athleticism.  The blades are performance enhancing prosthetics.  

 

Performance-enhancing blades raise an interesting question.  What if a world class runner adopted them?  Would a 9.30s 100 meter dash be fair?  How about a 1hr 50m marathon?  Would elite runners have to get amputations to compete?  Fortunately the really elite runners are staying away from this, but now we have another very good runner trying to compete.  Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has a great interview with Peter Weyand - one of the best biomechanics physiologists on the science and pseudoscience involved.  If you're interested in these things start at about 26 minutes in this episode. 

 

There will be innovation.  What happens in field sports that demand good court vision with augmented reality glasses?  Will they be banned and in what sports?  Will performance enhancing prosthetics for stick and racket sports come about?  What is pure and fair and where does inclusion fit in?

 

And now to a socially charged issue: transwomen and female sports.  To first order biological sex has two categories while gender is a continuum.  I think that gender should not be a category for discrimination, but that biological sex should be used to establish categories for fairness and, in some sports, safety.  There's a good deal of solid science that shows male puberty results in advantages in size, muscle mass, VO₂ max and a few other metrics.  These advantages are important in most sports and would exclude biological women from the elite and next to elite categories in most sports where men compete.¹ Testosterone is cited as the advantage, but suppressing it later in life only results in a small drop in performance (there are a few poorly done studies that claim otherwise).   This has become a social issue with a rightwing party calling for blanket bans in many activities including sports.  There's been pushback by allies.  In some cases female athletes have been threatened by sponsors to not speak out and go along with inclusion rather than fairness.   Should transathletes compete with men, females, or have their own category?  That seems to be a social decision that only a few sports bodies have addressed at this point. 

 

I'll admit to a bias.²   I believe in solid science and fairness. I think transwomen need to compete with men or have their own category. Politically I'm on the left on most issues and think transpeople should work and live how they want, but that doesn't extend into sport where categories exist for reasons of fairness.  Fairness to women overrides scientifically unsupported inclusion in my mind.

 

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¹ A chart showing the performance difference between biological male and female elite athletes. Longitudinal studies show a drop in male advantage from 5 to 30% after three years of testosterone suppression and a non-longitudinal study showed a similarly small drop after about 15 years. 

 

 

In the real world this means a transwoman swimmer who was poorly ranked as a male was able to easily defeat all of his NCAA female competitors even with a few years of testosterone suppression.  In sprinting it has been shown that biological Olympic gold medal females don't even make it into the top 2,000 for men.  It has been posited man ranked 1,000 could easily beat any women even if he had testosterone suppression that dropped his advantage by 30%.

² I have an involvement with beach volleyball and love both the men's and women's game.  I know a few Olympians on the women's side who sometimes train with amateur men who easily outpower them.  The fact the women are less athletic doesn't make their game less interesting..  it's just that the two styles of play are very different.

 

expectation dislocation

a quick minipost

I was listening to a  training technique discussion sports scientist Ross Tucker was having with a Royal Marines Green Beret.  Royal Marine training consists of a lot of what you might expect and adds a few areas you might not.  Expectation dislocation is considered one of the most important.   How do you psychologically and tactically deal with unexpected change?  How do you train people to handle it?

 

In science dislocation of expectations are considered a good thing, although they can be extremely frustrating at the time.  The overlooked, doing something stupid, being on the wrong track, the holy grail of unexpected discovery, and things mostly out of your control like equipment failures.  These things tend to play out more slowly than the battlefield or in sports.  Early in your career you make a lot of the stupid mistakes, find yourself on the wrong track and tend to overlook the obvious.  You learn with experience, but curveballs aren't uncommon and sometimes there's the taste of discovery.  

 

Sport offers dramatic examples.  I've had conversations with Sarah about preparing for and recognizing these dislocations in her sport.  How do you manage the psychological implications when you're trying to be "in the moment" at the same time?  Covid and the postponement of the Olympics had a huge impact on her.  But there are smaller examples.  Here's one of the most striking ones:

 

Sarah and Melissa face April and Alix in a semifinal in Cagliari.  Both teams are amazing - arguably the best in the world.   It's night with a chilly heavy rain.  At the 6:30 mark in the video Melissa goes down with a seriously dislocated shoulder.  After a doctor looks at it and a physical therapist re-locates it, she decides to go on - playing with one good arm.  The Canadians need to figure out local tactics and find a strategy as they go along. They only have their shared experience and all to brief moments of communication.  At one point a very fast spike targets Melissa's injured arm.  Something lights up in Sarah and she goes into her beast mode.  They win and go on to the gold medal match.  Unfortunately Melissa's arm isn't in great shape the next day and  they only take silver.

 

It's widely applicable.  Your car breaks down on a trip, a bad medical diagnosis ... any number of things ranging from very bad to very good.   How do you handle them in your life or your line of work?  How do you prepare yourself for these events?  These moments that can probe what we're made of.

 

ted lasso?

a minipost

I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:

 

Could a Ted Lasso exist?

 

If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team.  He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail.  It turns out he didn't.

 

There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously.  It could work.  You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team  of some kind.  Someone great at listening, observing and thinking.  They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach.   Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key.  You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.

 

The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching.  Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win.  Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams.  He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball -  are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen. 

 

There was general agreement among those in the panel.  Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue.  A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change.   As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned.  Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team.  He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.

 

It's culture all the way down at the top.  Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change. 

 

It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.  

 

skiing!

a minipost

With Beijing approaching I started into a piece on skiing, but the number of drawing needed to illustrate carved turns, sidecut radius, reverse camber, self-turning, plowing and so on was daunting.  Looking around I found a good, not very technical, discussion of downhill skiing. The discussion falls apart on freestyle and ski jumping. I'll save freestyle for later as it's a rich area.  But I know a little about ski jumping.

 

The point of ski jumping is to jump as far down a hill as possible while showing style. Contestants are judged on how far their landing is from a critical line know as the K line (kritisch is critical in German).   The main hill at the PyeongChang Olympics was K98 - the K line was 98 meters from the end of the jump.  The long hill was K125.

 

The first phase is the in-run.  A ski jumper releases from a metal bar at the top of the ramp and begins to turn  gravitational potential energy from the height they're at for kinetic energy.  They crouch to lower the area their body presents to the oncoming air.  Aerodynamic helmets and tight fitting suits are used and their arms are out behind them.   Ski jumps have refrigerated ceramic tracks that form a very slippery layer of ice.  New snow or warm sunlight can dramatically change frictional drag and ski waxes are picked for specific conditions.

 

The ski jumper has a good deal of speed and momentum as they reach the takeoff table at the end of the ramp.  It may look angled up, but that's an illusion. It's still slightly down and the jumper needs to change from the crouch they've been in and physically jump into the air.  You don't just fly off.  The timing and power of the jump are critical elements.

 

 The ski jumper/ski combination is a glider at this point subject to three forces:  gravity, aerodynamic drag, and lift.  They've changed from a minimal aerodynamic profile to something more like an airfoil with greater surface area and the best possible shape. The skis move to form a V shape and  with the ski jumper in control of the angle of each ski (a total of six angles) and their hip and chest angles. Their arms are held slightly apart from the body to add some additional area while keeping aerodynamic drag at a minimum.   The best lift to drag in competition is about 1.6 - for every meter a ski jumper drops, they travel 1.6 meters forward. A common sea gull has a L/D of about 10 and modern airliners are in the 15 to 18 range.  

 

The V ski position revolutionized the sport in the mid 80s. Sorting out all of the angles and learning how to  change them for differing conditions is necessary for winning.  The aerodynamic problem is still very computationally difficult, so large low speed wind tunnels as well as racks on top of vans are used for experimentation and training.

 

You might think that a heavy jumper, coming off the ramp with greater momentum, would have an advantage, but the force of gravity is more important and lighter jumpers fly farther.   There were body mass index requirements, now lighter skiers are penalized with shorter skis that reduce lift.  Ski jumpers still tend to be very thin.

 

The flight is rarely more than four meters above the ground, the flight plath roughly following the hill's downward slope. Landings are highly technical and judged for style.  The transition from the V flying configuration to parallel skis one foot ahead of the other requires timing, strength and balance. 

The longest ski jumping events are on K185 and longer hills - "ski flying"  It's not an Olympic event, but shows off the flying portion:

 

But one of the most memorable performances was that of Eddie the Eagle in the Calgary 88 games.  (it won't embed .. watch at the link) You can place last and be the most celebrated athlete Calgary.  If you've stood at the top of a ramp, you get an appreciation of what it must take to even try it.