omenti

choking under pressure

There's this story of a student, having just given his thesis defense talk, freezes at the first question with his chalk describing an arc as he faints.  The same story with different details has been told and retold since the 50s.  But there is real pressure.  It's rare, but some students fail their dissertation defense.   Just last week a friend told me about a failure at the University of Michigan. 

 

Temporary choking is much more common.  I've seen it in at least a third of the defenses I've been to.  Usually it's minor and people recognize it happens.  Questions are rephrased or breaks take place and things come back to normal.  It's just part of a rite of passage for many.

 

Choking is more recognized in sport. People talk about choking and 'the yips' - I'll stick with choking here was it's more common and easier to deal with.¹ I've seen it in several events at the Olympic and National and World Championship levels when a lot is on the line. Recent work published in Neuron shines some light on a neurological basis.  The experimenters monitored the motor cortex in the frontal lobe and watched a simple task requiring manual dexterity when the stakes were low, medium and high.   What they found was a big drop in activity as the stakes went up - the subjects suffered a big performance hit.  The effect was non-linear..  subjects didn't perform well at low reward levels - there was a sweet spot.  It's part of becoming an elite athlete to learn how to deal with the pressure, but it still happens on a regular basis. 

 

I've been interested in what the dynamics are in a team sport - specifically the simplest example with only two  athletes on a team.  Beach volleyball is a textbook example as there isn't a lot of overlap in responsibilities and players need to trust each other.  Over time - say an Olympic run - the best teams tend to have stable partnerships. When one player begins to crumble, it's up to the other to shoulder the load somehow and communicate - often with a few words or a bit of body language like a glance. It's an impressive skill to pick up on this in a couple of seconds in the middle of a point and figure out how to deal with it.   Interestingly there's evidence of sexual dimorphism in both style and success dealing with choking.  Sarah summed it up: men fight to bond, women bond to fight.  On average women may be more effective team players.²  Casual observation tells me this applies outside of sport. 

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¹ Some use the terms interchangeable, but differ in severity and treatment. Choking often occurs when an athlete over focuses on mechanics under pressure and lose the fluidity, grace, ability to analyze etc, that  they've spent their career building. Their effective skill level falls dramatically.   The yips, on the other hand, take place when anxiety is so high that it becomes difficult to execute even simple actions.  It can be chronic requiring help from specialists.

² For this reason I tend to prefer women's team sports to men's.  Men's sports are more athletic, but the women often show superior team tactics and strategies. 

 

 

first, third, second, fifth, fourth - a psychological tour

A minipost

There's a common signal that emerges when you talk to elite athletes about how they feel about their final position.  Universally they say bronze medals feel better than silvers and fourth place is the worst in single elimination play with quarter and semifinals.  

 

Sarah, in particular, has gone into detail. She notes the goal, given the depth in her sport, is a podium finish,  Just missing feels awful.  If you're eliminated before that, you tend to move on towards the next tournament.  Taking third means that you've redeemed an earlier loss by winning. Second means - "if only..."

 

While there's variation in measuring how athletes feel and well as variation among athletes, several studies confirm this ordering.   Explanations generally boil  down to counterfactual thinking.   In one type, known as ex post counterfactuals,  you think about alternate pasts.  "if I had only delayed my block by a quarter of a second, we could have won" or "if it wasn't for them serving into the net we could have lost."  The other type, known as ex ante counterfactuals,  is described by  dwelling on what was expected to be:  "everyone thought we'd take gold, but we failed or "no one thought we'd qualify and look how far we got."   

A silver medalist tends to focus on the negative ex post counterfactual.  It's even worse when there's a negative ex ante counterfactual - an expectation of taking gold.  Fourth place follows a similar pattern plus you don't even get to stand on the podium.  Athletes really hate fourths. 

 

Of course counterfactual thinking, positive and negative, exists in many other places.

 

 

 

heat and the paris games

It's wrong to hold a Summer Olympics in Tokyo in late July through early August. The right time for the Summer Games in many climates would be the Fall, but television schedules force the Summer.  The combination of temperature and humidity can be dangerous.  Endurance events, tennis and beach volleyball take place outdoors and can place athletes and spectators at risk. With Covid Tokyo didn't risk spectators as there weren't any, but some of the events took place in borderline insane conditions.  The top Canadian team played one of their matches with a wet bulb globe temperature of about 40° C.¹  Sarah texted photos of herself sitting in baths of ice water to bring her core temperature down to safe levels.  Four hours at 35° C is considered potentially lethal for a young person in good physical shape.  A new standard suggests the limit for any outdoor activity should be about 32° for this cohort and 28°C for anyone over 60, under 8,  or anyone with any number of medical conditions  

 

There is a good chance Paris could be worse this year.  The Olympic Village is not air conditioned.  To meet certain green goals it uses passive geothermal cooling, which is great, but doesn't work well in extreme conditions.  Team USA, Canada, Australia and probably many others will install portable air conditioners in athlete housing and indoor training rooms.  Spectators are on their own.  Paris is not a heat-friendly city. 

 

When you do any kind of physical work like staying alive or exercising, about eighty percent of the energy you take in is converted to heat.  Some of that raising your body temperature above the environment around you, the rest is waste heat.  A moderately fast bike ride can require about 200 watts so you have 800 watts of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Sarah, in an intense match, averages about hour hundred watts with higher peaks.  She has to get rid of two kilowatts.  Evaporating liquid water takes quite a bit of energy and our bodies are wonderfully set up to do this.  Sweat is your friend.  It works well in dry heat, but becomes more difficult as the humidity goes up and impossible when the the wet bulb temperature is above a certain value (in fact trying to use a fan can make matters worse).  

 

One can imagine an event being postposed due to extreme conditions, but the fact that Tokyo had events suggests training your body to sweat better -  heat conditioning - makes sense.  You can become a better sweaters by making your body to handle electrolytes differently, sweating earlier and more, having more dilute sweat and a few other biochemical tricks that enhance your ability to deal with the heat.  One  can train in hot and humid areas - places like the American Southeast and parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia.   That's not practical for many and  not controllable so other techniques have emerged.  Some use a stationary bike in a heated chamber, but sauna therapy works as well or better.  You sit in a 80° to 90°C sauna for about 45 minutes in 15 minute shifts with 15 minute breaks every day for about two weeks.  After that you can maintain an enhanced level doing this two or three times a week.  Not fun, but it works.   In some events medals may well be decided by who has had better heat preparation.

 

Much of the rest of the world is on its own dealing with heat.  Some are suggesting air conditioning should be a human right.  To say there are major challenges is an understatement - one that the first world mostly ignores and will probably continue to ignore until events like two or three day power outages turn off AC in heatwaves.

 

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¹ A wet bulb globe temperature is more detailed than a heat index or "feels like" temperature.  It takes into account temperature, humidity, water evaporation and sun exposure. Calibrated instruments start at around $500 and go up so it's generally not reported.  Standard "feels like" temperature is an ok starting point and much better than regular temperature for decision making.

 

working to improve women's sports

Being around elite female athletes you recognize female specific sports science, equipment and training is far below that enjoyed by males.  People are surprised that women-specific soccer (football outside of the US) shoes only appeared in 2022 and many coaches of young women have never heard of RED-S, which can impact health for the rest of their lives.  ACL injuries may well be preventable with better training when girls are young. If you're interested in sports as an athlete or a fan - and especially if you know a girl who does sport, this interview of Christine Yu about her book Up to Speed is a good starting point.  I've read the book and recommend it if you're interested in more depth.  

 

 

 

science vs policy and a wedge issue

Something a few of you have heard from me privately and something that may raise some eyebrows.  Namely  gender in lieu of biological sex in athletic events.

 

It's generally agreed there are three important issues in sport:  safety, fairness and inclusivity.  Many sports have categories to promote fairness and even safety -- age and weight categories for example.  Some areas of sport - parasports are a good example - have dozens of categories.  And females (I'll try and avoid the term women as it's more closely associated with gender these days) have their own protected category as, for most sports, males have a serious advantage.

 

Currently the  IOC and many pro-LGBT groups have come down on inclusivity trumping fairness and safety.   When males go through puberty a number of athletic advantages are bestowed.  Testosterone is the primary trigger, but most of these changes are permanent and chemically lowering testosterone levels after the fact only has a marginal impact on athletic performance.  There are a few pieces of work that the science in "unsettled" and there are areas that need more study, as in all science, but the basics are well-established. 

 

I tend to be very liberal and pro-LGBT, but the violation of fairness in sport for biological females is a bridge too far for me.¹  Female events exist to give women a fair chance to compete.  I'm biased as a good friend who happens to be a World Champion, two time Olympian, four time first team All American and Honda Award winner.. she also happens to be female.  Additionally I know a few other world class athletes who are women. They're afraid to speak openly on the subject, but anonymous polls are usually at the 90% level for keeping female events open only to XX competitors.  This does not mean to exclude trans-women from sport.  They can compete with men in an open category where they're more fairly matched.  If need be the open category can have trans and non-trans divisions, but there's a strong belief among female athletes that their category needs protection.  Unfortunately they're not being listened to.

 

Recently 20 of the top sports scientists published a paper in fairly clear language on the subject in one of the most recognized sport science journals.  

from the paper (I encourage that anyone with an interest in the subject to read the full paper)

The International Olympic Committee framework on fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations does not protect fairness for female athletes

Abstract
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently published a framework on fairness, inclusion, and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations. Although we appreciate the IOC's recognition of the role of sports science and medicine in policy development, we disagree with the assertion that the IOC framework is consistent with existing scientific and medical evidence and question its recommendations for implementation. Testosterone exposure during male development results in physical differences between male and female bodies; this process underpins male athletic advantage in muscle mass, strength and power, and endurance and aerobic capacity. The IOC's “no presumption of advantage” principle disregards this reality. Studies show that transgender women (male-born individuals who identify as women) with suppressed testosterone retain muscle mass, strength, and other physical advantages compared to females; male performance advantage cannot be eliminated with testosterone suppression. The IOC's concept of “meaningful competition” is flawed because fairness of category does not hinge on closely matched performances. The female category ensures fair competition for female athletes by excluding male advantages. Case-by-case testing for transgender women may lead to stigmatization and cannot be robustly managed in practice. We argue that eligibility criteria for female competition must consider male development rather than relying on current testosterone levels. Female athletes should be recognized as the key stakeholders in the consultation and decision-making processes. We urge the IOC to reevaluate the recommendations of their Framework to include a comprehensive understanding of the biological advantages of male development to ensure fairness and safety in female sports.

 

It's unfortunately that people who are coming down on the side of fair competition are being lumped with heavily politicized anti LGBT hysteria.  It's something of a wedge issue and I hate seeing it being used as part of the hammer to come down on the LGBT community. 

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¹ There are real genetic edge cases that happen to be quite rare and mechanisms exist to deal with some of these issues - but that's looking at less than 0.1% of the population rather than 99.9+%

 

 

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.