An Olympian Task

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Supercomputers are being used to analyze swimming mechanics:

Mr. Mark donated the Rose and Krayzelburg scans, and a set of videos from USA Swimming’s flume in Colorado Springs. One showed Ms. Coughlin dolphin-kicking. When he saw it, Prof. Mittal knew she was the swimmer he had to use.

“She swam straight, maintaining an even depth,” he says. “All fish do this, passing a wave through their bodies from head to tail. This was it — the natural-selection stroke, the best way to swim.”

Lacking a scan of Ms. Coughlin, Prof. Mittal assigned a student to superimpose her videoed body, frame by frame, onto the scan of Ms. Rose. He then asked James Hahn, director of GWU’s Institute for Computer Graphics, to essentially insert a skeleton, enabling the scan to move. The output is a goggled, silver phantom, dolphining across a black screen, trailing a thin red line undulating across a graph — sort of like the markings on an electrocardiogram.

Three-dimensional, observable from all angles, this creature is Prof. Mittal’s raw material. All he has to add next is water. Pushing the limits of his field-computational fluid dynamics, he plans to factor in every swirl and counterswirl produced by an ever-changing sequence of motions known as a single stroke. To account for every eddy within every eddy, he will break each stroke into 20,000 units and perform 200 million calculations on every one.

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A Slice of Time and Space

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Years ago, when digital video — or affordable digital video — was new, I thought it would be fun to turn live-action video into an animated cartoon. A Slice of Time and Space explains why that’s not so easy:

Though others have turned a still image into a cartoon, turning a video into a cartoon is more challenging. ‘Some people say it’s easy,’ said Cohen. ‘They use the technique for still images and apply it frame-by-frame. The problem is, if you do this, the images jump all over the place. The background shakes around a lot, and each frame looks like a different drawing. We want to make the video look like a normal cartoon where the motion is smooth.’

Of course, this is why traditional animated characters don’t have any shading; the shading would crawl around from frame to frame.

How does Cohen’s technique work?

“We use a method called segmentation. We extend 2D segmentation to 3D. This creates shapes inside the video. It’s as if you took a stack of photographs and then cut them with a knife as though they were a solid chunk of color,” said Cohen.

Pixels in a video can be thought of as lying in six dimensional space – two image axes, time, and three color components. Pixels close to each other in this “space” form denser regions. The program clusters the pixels into a 3D shape, which can then be ‘sliced’ as though you were taking a slice of time and space.

[...]

To define more meaningful regions, the user outlines the shapes on keyframes in the video, such as the pants on the girl swinging. He does this on several keyframes. “We rely on the user to circle things like the girl’s pants. There’s different shading on the pants, and some stripes. We can’t group them automatically,” said Cohen.

The system can then interpolate between the keyframes, maintaining smooth trajectories along the time dimension, without jerky transitions or the need to draw on each frame.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

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The View From Out There

Thursday, August 12th, 2004

The View From Out There reviews History Lessons, a book composed of excerpts on America from other countries’ history textbooks:

According to Canadian texts (six are cited), the United States planned to conquer and annex Canada during the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and at various points in between. During the Cold War, the United States repeatedly bullied Canada into supporting its aggressive military policies. Canadian officials hoped that NATO would evolve into a North Atlantic community that would act as a counterweight to U.S. influence in Canada, but in vain: Canadian governments had to toe the U.S. line or suffer humiliation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, concerned that Kennedy’s belligerence might lead to a nuclear war, waited three days before announcing that Canadian forces had gone on the alert. In the next election, the Americans used their influence to topple the truculent prime minister. Diefenbaker’s successor, Lester Pearson, aligned Canada more closely with the United States, but in 1965 he annoyed Lyndon Johnson by calling for a bombing pause and a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. In a meeting after the speech, Johnson grabbed Pearson by the lapels and shouted, ‘You pissed on my rug.’

Thus have Canadian texts immortalized the Johnson vernacular.

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The Bush vision for term two

Thursday, August 12th, 2004

In the Bush vision for term two, Tyler Cowen has the following recommendations for bringing about an ‘ownership society’:

  1. Eliminate all farm subsidies, tariffs, quotas and price supports.
  2. Tell Western Europe it is paying for its own defense from now on.
  3. Admit that the Medicare drug prescription bill was a mistake. Repeal it, and consider a revenue-neutral benefit that does not discriminate against prescription drugs. Introduce means-testing for Medicare to stop that program from bankrupting us. I would rather cut this benefit than repeal the tax cuts [tax shifts, correctly, though spending discipline could turn them into real tax cuts.] The long-run benefits of greater capital accumulation remain significant.
  4. Negotiate bilateral free trade agreements as rapidly as possible. Start with Japan, the second largest economy in the world.
  5. Strengthen America’s commitment to science. This will have implications for educational policy, immigration policy, and regulatory policy. Don’t restrict stem cell research. Hope that science comes up with affordable and politically sustainable solutions for global warming and clean energy independence. You might have libertarian objections to science subsidies, but the realistic alternative today is more government intervention.
  6. Strengthen early warning systems against infectious diseases. Increase research into cures, vaccines, immunity, and the like. We don’t want the world to lose fifty million people to avian flu or some other malady.
  7. Take in more immigrants, but demand higher levels of skills and education. At the very least, take in any revenue-positive immigrant.
  8. Abolish the Department of Education.
  9. Abolish the Department of Energy.
  10. Repeal all corporate welfare.
  11. Repeal the corporate income tax. Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. Admittedly these are “ifs,” depending on fiscal considerations.
  12. Get on TV and tell the nation that a free economy is a critical source of our strength. Tell them you mean it, and then mean it. Economic growth is the greatest long-run gift we can give to the world.

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Unorthodox Rift

Thursday, August 12th, 2004

In Unorthodox Rift, Exiled Church Splits On Rejoining Russia explains how the Russian Orthodox church has split into two churches that may remerge:

It all goes back to 1054, when Orthodoxy and Catholicism split, creating separate power centers in Constantinople and Rome. The sacking of Constantinople, from which Greek Orthodoxy eventually sprang, in 1453 led Moscow to assert itself as the ‘Third Rome.’ Over time, the Russian church and state grew closer, especially after the Romanovs, the royal family, consolidated their power in the 1600s.

When the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in 1917, they stripped the Moscow Patriarchate of its property, dynamited its churches and slaughtered the royal family. The leader of the Moscow Patriarchate died in jail. His successor, Metropolitan Sergius, won his freedom in 1927 by pledging allegiance to the Soviets.

Surviving Russian aristocrats and clergy formed the Church Abroad in what was then Yugoslavia to preserve the religion of the czars until Russians were free to worship at home again. A southern regiment in the czar’s army entrusted to the exiled church the banners, which feature a two-headed imperial eagle, the likeness of Saint George the dragon-slayer and an “N” for Czar Nicholas I. The Church Abroad, which claims about 100,000 members world-wide and has parishes in many parts of the U.S., moved its headquarters to New York in 1950. (A separate offshoot of Russian Orthodoxy, known as the Orthodox Church in America, cut its ties with Moscow in the 1970s. Its 750,000 members conduct services in English and stress their American identity. Reunification isn’t an issue for them, having long ago made peace with the Moscow Patriarchate.)

For generations, adherents of the Church Abroad tried to recreate the glorious days of the Romanovs. They used their royal titles, raised their children to read Pushkin in the original Russian and threw formal balls at ritzy New York hotels. Their church holds services mostly in Old Church Slavonic, an older form of Russian. Feast-day ceremonies last upward of five hours. Only a few members of the church ever talked about reuniting with Moscow.

Last year, Mr. Putin intervened, hoping to bring back together the two branches of Russian Orthodoxy in an effort to restore a national identity to a country ripped apart by the Soviet Union’s collapse.

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Interrogation Special Focus Team

Wednesday, August 11th, 2004

The Interrogation Special Focus Team questionaire asks military interrogators a number of questions as “part of an inquiry convened by the Secretary of Defense for the purpose of identifying all interrogation techniques employed in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Joint Special Operations in USCENTCOM area of responsibility, Iraq Survey Group operations, and Guantanamo Bay detention operations.” It asks interrogators if they used any of the following techniques:

Direct

Incentive/Removal of Incentive

Emotional Love

Emotional Hate

Fear Up Harsh

Fear Up Mild

Fear Down

Pride and Ego Up

Pride and Ego Down

Futility

We Know All

Establish Your Identity

Repetition

File and Dossier

Mutt And Jeff

Rapid Fire

Silence

Change of Scene Up

Change of Scene Down

Dietary Manipulation

Environmental Manipulation

Sleep Adjustment

False Flag

Isolation

Presence of Military Working

Dog

Sleep Management

Yelling, Loud Music, and Light

Control

Deception

Stress Positions

20-hour interrogations

Use of Hood or Blackout

Goggles

Removal of Comfort Items

Forced Grooming

Mild Physical Contact

Opposite Sex Interrogators

How many of those would make good band names?

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Yahoo! News – Allergy Vaccine Could Hit Market Soon -Researcher

Wednesday, August 11th, 2004

From Yahoo! News – Allergy Vaccine Could Hit Market Soon -Researcher:

Professor Paul Van Cauwenberge, who coordinates a European allergy and asthma research project, said researchers at the Medical University of Vienna have been able to protect a trial group of 124 people against the effects of birch pollen allergy.

They were injected with a genetically modified version of the pollen.

[...]

“They are using a technique which allows mass production. If these results are confirmed on a larger scale … a vaccine could hit the market relatively soon, within about two years,” Van Cauwenberghe said.

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The Onion

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

I haven’t been keeping up with The Onion lately. Anyway, I swung by, and I really enjoyed Goth Kid Builds

Scary-Ass Birdhouse. I also enjoyed the idea behind CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog. Is it wrong to nervously laugh at their 1976 headline: Cambodia to Switch to Skull-Based Economy?

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Girl Meets Boy, at 60 Miles an Hour (washingtonpost.com)

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

Girl Meets Boy, at 60 Miles an Hour explains how “Young women are crashing cars — and dying in cars — at significantly higher rates than a decade ago”:

They’re driving, in other words, like guys.

Federal highway officials are so alarmed by this that they put it near the top of a recent press release, citing among 15- to- 20-year-olds a 42 percent increase in young female driver fatalities from 1992 to 2002 (the rate for young males rose 15 percent). State Farm Insurance, a leading auto insurer, has monitored the trend and adjusted its rates for girls accordingly: from 61 percent less than boys’ rates in 1985, to 40 percent less today.

[...]

Wright says the agency is going to have to expand its research because although teenage boys still crash more often than girls, the gap is narrowing. Sixteen-year-old female drivers, for example, were involved nationally in 175 car crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers in 2000, up from 160 crashes in 1990. Boys’ involvement declined over the same period, from 216 to 210. There are about as many female as male licensed drivers under 21: 6 million.

Read the whole article for some accounts of brazen, unapologetic stupidity.

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Buyer’s Remorse

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

In Buyer’s Remorse, Daniel Akst examines Americans’ mixed feelings about wealth:

There are two things at which Americans have always excelled: One is generating almost unimaginable material wealth, and the other is feeling bad about it.

Some stats:

When Princeton University researchers asked working Americans about these matters a decade ago, 89 percent of those surveyed agreed that ?our society is much too materialistic,? and 74 percent said that materialism is a serious social problem.

I remember trying to read an actual Horatio Alger “rags to riches” story, where the protagonist rises through his own pluck, luck, and integrity. It was awful. Anyway, there’s a lot I didn’t know about Alger:

When accusations of ?unnatural? acts with teenage boys — acts he did not deny — forced him from his pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, the erstwhile Unitarian minister decamped for New York City, where he became a professional writer. It was in venal New York that he made his name with the kind of stories we associate with him to this day: tales of unschooled but goodhearted lads whose spunk, industry, and yes, good looks, win them material success, with the help of a little luck and their older male mentors. Alger?s hackneyed parables are tales of the American dream, itself an accumulation of hopes that has always had a strongly materialistic component. The books themselves are now ignored, but their central fable has become part of our heritage. ?Alger is to America,? wrote the novelist Nathanael West, ?what Homer was to the Greeks.?

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How To Be Idle

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

How To Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson, examines “the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible”:

I wonder if that hard-working American rationalist and agent of industry Benjamin Franklin knew how much misery he would cause in the world when, back in 1757, high on puritanical zeal, he popularised and promoted the trite and patently untrue aphorism ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’?

A bit of history:

The English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid-18th century, work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did “jobs”, but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown.

Take the weavers. Before the invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: “So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased,” he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition Of The Working Class In England. “They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed.”

Thompson writes: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did “sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening”. Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging. Thompson adds as an aside: “The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] —today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

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One Giant Lift for Mankind

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

In One Giant Lift for Mankind, Josh Levin describes “the race for the 1,000-pound bench press”:

For years, the bench press world record crept up slowly and steadily. In the 1950s, Canadian Doug Hepburn became the first man to bench 400, 450, and 500 pounds. In 1957, Hepburn told Muscle Power magazine that a 600-pound bench press was possible, but it wasn’t until 1967 that Pat Casey cracked that barrier. Ted Arcidi broke 700 in 1985, and it took another 17 years until Ryan Kennelly benched 800 pounds in 2002. Now, just two years later, 10 men have benched 800, and a couple are closing in on 1,000. So, why have records that stood up to the strongest men in the world for 50 years crumbled in the last two?

A super-shirt, mostly. In 1983, a college student and powerlifter named John Inzer started making shirts that supported benchers’ shoulders and deltoids. Word spread that the bench shirt not only prevented injuries but actually helped bounce the weight off your chest. The terminology on Inzer’s web site reeks of pseudoscience — the top-of-the-line Inzer Phenom shirt “features the EVS (Escape Velocity System) built inside” — but the shirt’s effect is undeniable. As the record for the shirted bench press shot up to 965 pounds, the unshirted or “raw” mark has stayed at an earthly 713 pounds. (Scot Mendelson has that record.) Nowadays, every top bench-presser uses the shirt for safety and power. “The whole raw thing, you’re just asking for trouble if you’re going to be dealing with any kind of weight,” says Ryan Kennelly. “If you rip your pec, you rip your rotator cuff, you’re out of there. Thank God for bench shirts.”

The bench shirt — which comes in denim or polyester — has arms that jut out zombielike, perpendicular to the chest. The position is so awkward and the fit so tight that lifters typically need help swaddling themselves. As the bar starts to press the weightlifter’s arms down, a percentage of the load goes to deforming the shirt. High-end shirts are so taut that for the bar to even reach a bencher’s chest, the fabric has to be compressed with incredible force. (At one meet, Rychlak had to abandon an 890-pound lift because it wasn’t heavy enough to force the weight down to his pecs.) When the bencher starts to push the bar back up, the shirt acts like a spring. As the material snaps back to its original, zombie-arm orientation, the lifter’s elbows get a bit of extra help moving the weight back into the air.

Inzer says the bench shirt “brings out the deeper strength of a lifter.” Powerlifting traditionalists and scientists think the opposite.

As the record for the shirted bench press shot up to 965 pounds, the unshirted or “raw” mark has stayed at an earthly 713 pounds. I feel so very, very weak.

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Olympic Wrestling Timeline

Monday, August 9th, 2004

TheMat.com‘s Olympic Wrestling Timeline offers some interesting trivia:

1896 – Athens, Greece

The first modern Olympics was held in Athens, Greece, home of the ancient Olympics. Wrestling, one of the featured sports of the ancient Games, was included in the program of the first modern Olympics. The style was Greco-Roman, and just one weight class was contested, heavyweight. Karl Schumann of Germany became the first Olympic wrestling gold medalist. No U.S. wrestlers participated in the Athens Games.

1900 – Paris, France

Wrestling was not included in the program at the 1900 Olympics, the only time during the modern Games that wrestling was not a featured sport.

1904 – St. Louis, Mo.

The first of the modern Olympic Games held in the United States featured freestyle wrestling, a style that was popular in the United States. The U.S. was the only nation entered in wrestling and scored a clean sweep of all the wrestling medals, with seven golds, seven silvers and seven bronzes.

1906 – Athens, Greece

Athens became the first city to host more than one modern Olympic Games. Greco-Roman wrestling, more popular than freestyle in Europe, was the featured style, and freestyle was not included. Three Greco-Roman champions were crowned, and the United States did not participate in wrestling event.

1908 – London, England

The London Olympics featured both of the international wrestling styles for the first time, freestyle and Greco-Roman. The United States dominated the freestyle light weights, with George Mehnert claiming the 119-pound title and George Dole capturing the 132.5-pound event. For Mehnert, it was a second career Olympic title. It would be another 84 years before an American wrestler would win a second Olympic gold medal, when John Smith and Bruce Baumgartner claimed second titles in Barcelona. Mehnert was a club wrestler from Newark, New Jersey, while Dole, who competed at Yale, helped establish the tradition of college wrestlers moving on to Olympic glory.

Greco-Roman was dominated by European nations, and the United States did not participate.

1912 – Stockholm, Sweden

Greco-Roman, the favored style of the Scandinavian nations, was the only wrestling event in Stockholm, and the gold medals went to athletes from either Finland or Sweden. The United States entered athletes, but did not medal.

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Flag Relay

Monday, August 9th, 2004

Flag Relay describes how globalism has spread to athletics:

Consider the case of Alistair Cragg. The 5,000-meter runner was born in South Africa. He ran track at the University of Arkansas. So which nation will he represent at the Olympics in Athens beginning Aug. 13? South Africa? No. The United States? No. Cragg will be running for…Ireland.

Or consider boxer Andre Berto. Born in Florida, Berto hoped to fight for the United States in the 2004 Olympics, but he was disqualified from the U.S. team for fouling an opponent in a key bout. Now he’s fighting for Haiti.

Then there’s Malachi Davis. Born in Sacramento, he ran the 400 meters for UCLA. In Athens, he’ll be representing Britain, a nation he had never set foot in until this summer.

This country-jumping is possible because Olympic rules permit each nation to decide who is eligible for its team. Thus, Ireland could rule that Cragg qualifies for dual citizenship because his grandparents were born in Ireland. Haiti embraced Berto because his parents were Haitian. And Britain issued Davis a passport because his mother was born in London. Needless to say, the sluggish bureaucracy of citizenship is frequently streamlined for Olympians.

Meanwhile, Greece has granted summary dual citizenship to the 22 foreign baseball players of Greek heritage while simultaneously exempting them from Greek military service. Greece also recruited a softball team composed almost entirely of Americans of Greek heritage.

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Wired – Lighter-Than-Air Force

Monday, August 9th, 2004

Lighter-Than-Air Force describes how the Department of Defense plans to transport its 1,800-person “units of action” in the near future:

The scheme, code-named Walrus, is just getting off the ground. But the agency is clear about what it wants: a prototype ‘tri-phibian’ (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008. ‘The program will not repackage 1930s technology or upscale the more limited commercial dirigibles of today,’ Darpa promised in its proposal. The Walrus will rely on new technologies, like static ion propulsion, says Preston Carter, the program manager.

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