Deep Catch vs. Scull

Friday, July 13th, 2012

In the 1960s, Indiana University men’s swimming coach, James “Doc” Counsilman, decided that lift, rather than drag, could and should provide a majority of the propulsion for human swimmers, and that the way to generate lift was to scull, or move the stroking arm through an S-curve underwater, rather than paddle in a “deep catch” style. Now the Johns Hopkins scientists who previously studied the breaststroke have moved on to studying the crawl:

They began by creating a virtual animated arm, using laser scans and motion-capture videos from Olympic-caliber swimmers. “We decided to separate the arm from the rest of the body so the we could study, in isolation, the underwater flow dynamics” around a swimmer’s arm during the freestyle stroke or backstroke, says Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins and a devoted recreational swimmer, who oversaw the study.

They then gathered underwater videos of elite swimmers, supplied by USA Swimming, which they categorized as displaying either a sculling or a deep-catch stroke.

The scientists ran their animated arm through multiple simulations of each stroke, requiring thousands of hours of computer time.

The result was “a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Mittal says. It turned out that lift was, as Doc Counsilman had maintained, important for efficient, and therefore fast, stroking. In all of the scientists’ simulations, lift provided a majority of the propulsive force.

But sculling did not supply much lift. In fact, it impeded both lift and drag. “Our shoulders won’t twist all the way around,” Dr. Mittal says, meaning our arms won’t lever about as ship propellers do, and the amount of lift we can create by sculling is small.

The better choice for human propulsion, he says, was the paddlelike deep-catch stroke, which actually produced more lift than sculling, along with a hefty dose of drag.

[...]

An effective deep-catch stroke requires considerable shoulder strength, which many swimmers lack, making a sculling-based stroke easier for them, at least until they develop robustly muscled shoulders.

“How you roll your body in the water with each stroke will also matter,” he says, as will overall fitness. “Sculling is less fatiguing,” so less-fit swimmers may opt to scull, he says.

But for fit, powerful swimmers, or those who aspire to become such, “my advice would be to use the deep-catch stroke,” he says.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Take the C-Train

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

Incentives matter, and if you ended subsidies for roads, people would drive less, Josh Barro notes — but not much less:

An end to road subsidies would raise gasoline prices by about 50 to 60 cents a gallon. Over the last decade, fuel prices rose much more sharply than that, which led to a modest reduction in vehicle-miles traveled, but there hasn’t been any sea change in our transportation practices.

That’s because the real culprit keeping Americans away from mass transit and inside cars isn’t subsidies; it’s planning and zoning. Cities impose barriers to density that limit the number of housing units and offices that can be located near buses and trains, which reduces mass-transit usage. These barriers also drive up property prices in areas near mass transit, penalizing transit-oriented living and encouraging people to live farther from urban cores, in areas where they have to drive. Meanwhile, cities often require builders to include a minimum number of parking spaces in new developments, depressing the market price of parking and further rewarding drivers.

A better approach would take advantage of the fact that proximity to transit increases property values. Cities should allow dense development, collect the property taxes that are generated, and use them to finance transit. Increased development also means more transit users and more fare revenues. But locals tend to oppose greater housing density; they also often demand parking minimums, since they don’t want to face too much competition for free on-street parking.

Costs for rail-transit construction in the United States are egregiously high compared with costs in Europe and Asia, he says:

Smart planning decisions, like the ones that Calgary made when planning its C-Train light-rail system, can help lower the cost of building new infrastructure.

Calgary’s in neither Europe nor Asia, and Barro doesn’t explain what those smart planning decisions were, either — but Wikipedia does:

Costs were controlled during construction and operation of the system by using relatively cheap, existing technology. A grade separated system was passed over in preference of a system without significant elevated or buried elements and the trains and stations selected were of the tried and tested, utilitarian variety (for example, vehicles are not air conditioned, storage yards are not automated and stations are in general concrete platforms with a modest shelter overhead). This allowed more track to be laid with the available funds and contrasts with the Edmonton Light Rail Transit which buried the portion of the system in downtown and under the University of Alberta, increasing costs. The C-Train uses a self service model of payment, reducing fare collection costs.

In 2001, the US General Accounting Office released a study of the cost-effectiveness of American light rail systems. Although not included in the report, Calgary had a capital cost of US$24.5 million per mile (year 2000 dollars), which would be the sixth lowest (Edmonton was given as US$41.7 million per mile). Because of its high ridership (then 188,000 boardings per weekday) the capital cost per passenger was $2,400 per daily passenger, by far the lowest of the 14 systems compared (had Edmonton been included it would have been the next most cost effective at $8,900 per weekday passenger, while the closest American system was Sacramento at $9,100 per weekday passenger). Operating costs are also low, in 2005, the C-Train cost CDN$163 per operating hour to operate. With an average of 600 boardings per hour, cost per LRT passenger is CDN$0.27, compared to $1.50 for bus passengers in Calgary.

Planning for the C-Train also played an important role. Although the light rail system was not chosen until 1976, the city had reserved transit corridors for some form of high capacity transport in the 1960s, and planning for the system was done when Calgary’s population was less than 500,000. The city reached an agreement with CP Rail to build most of the south line along their existing right-of-way. The lines and stations were placed to serve large residential areas and business districts and to serve existing and predicted travel patterns. Feeder bus stations were established.

The city chose not to build major freeways into the city centre, forcing commuters to use the train as their numbers increased but downtown street capacity did not. Similarly, the city limited the number of parking spaces in the downtown core, making it prohibitively expensive for many people to drive to downtown jobs, particularly as surface lots gave way to development. Downtown unreserved monthly parking is amongst the most expensive in North America, behind only Midtown and Downtown Manhattan for business districts. As a result, in 2007 45% of Calgary’s 120,000 downtown workers used Calgary Transit to get to work, with a long term goal of reaching that mark to 60% of downtown workers in the future.

Although not generally grade separated, the C-Train is able to operate at high speeds on much of its track by separating it from pedestrians with fences and concrete bollards. Trains are also given right of way at most road crossings outside of downtown. As a result, trains are able to operate at 80 km/h (50 mph) outside of downtown, and 40 km/h (25 mph) along the 7th Avenue corridor. 7th Avenue is a free fare zone, encouraging use for short hops through the city. The city achieves high capacity on the 7th Avenue transit corridor by staging the traffic lights, so that all the trains move forward in unison to the next station on the synchronized green lights, and load and unload passengers on the intervening red lights.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Im Dong-Hyun

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

South Korean Olympic archer Im Dong-Hyun is legally blind:

Every archer who steps out onto Lord’s cricket ground to compete in the London Olympics will have to hit a target roughly the size of an apple from a distance just shy of the length of a football pitch.

But for one archer, the yellow circle at the heart of the target will be a fuzzy blob. Im Dong-hyun, a softly spoken 25-year-old Korean with burnt orange highlights in his hair, is widely considered the best archer in the world.

He has two Olympic gold medals from the team events in Athens and Beijing. He holds the current world record for 72 arrows, with a score of 687 out of 720.

But according to the Korean Archery Federation, he is legally blind, with vision of 20/100 in his right eye and 20/200 in his left. In his words, it leaves the rainbow colours of the archery target looking “as if different types of paint have been dropped in water. The lines are blurred.”

Im began losing his eyesight as a teenager, when he was already an established archer, although there are no tell-tale signs.

“I do not feel that I need to wear glasses. I am not myopic, I am far-sighted,” he said, after one of his daily training sessions at his training centre in Seoul.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Marijuana without the high

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

THC is often described as the active ingredient in marijuana, but cannabis includes more than 60 so-called cannabinoids.

Zack Klein, head of development at Tikun Olam, the company that has just developed a marijuana without the high, describes the plant, which is grown atop the hills of the Galilee:

“Sometimes the high is not always what they need. Sometimes it is an unwanted side effect. For some of the people it’s not even pleasant.”

[...]

But cannabis also contains Cannabidiol, or CBD, a substance that some researchers say has anti-inflammatory benefits. Unlike THC, it hardly binds to the brain’s receptors and can therefore work without getting patients stoned.

Tikun Olam began its research on CBD enhanced cannabis in 2009 and about six months ago they came up with Avidekel, a cannabis strain that contains 15.8 per cent CBD and only traces of THC, less than one per cent.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Building Better Olympic Athletes

Monday, July 9th, 2012

Olympic hurdler Bolo Jones trains while attended by a crew of 22 scientists and technicians, paid for by Red Bull, her sponsor:

It is her seventh training session with the team, and today they’ve arrayed 40 motion-capture cameras along the track. She’s also being monitored by a system called Optojump, which measures the exact location and duration of Jones’ contact with the rubberized surface on every step and after every hurdle. And a high-speed Phantom Flex camera rigged next to the track can zoom alongside Jones and film her at 1,500 frames a second. The Red Bull team calibrates the equipment while Jones warms up.

[...]

The resulting hi-res footage is both beautiful and revealing, showing far more detail about her hurdling than the naked eye could ever see.

Jones and her coach gather with the scientists and watch the video to see how quickly she is getting her lead leg back on the ground after each hurdle. “We discovered that I wasn’t kicking down my front leg as soon as I could,” Jones says. “I’m just trying to get down a little sooner over every hurdle, maybe an inch closer on each one. Over the course of 10 hurdles, that’s 10 inches, and when you’re winning or losing by hundredths of seconds, that’s a lot.”

Richard Kirby, an engineer on the project, ticks off other discoveries. They found that Jones was usually fastest on her fourth or fifth trial, so Shaver increased the length of her warm-up time before races. They discovered that her left side wasn’t as strong and stiff as her right, which caused her to wobble slightly down the track, reducing her speed, so now she’s working to strengthen that side of her body. And they found that sometimes she lands with her center of mass behind her front foot, which for a sprinter is like pumping the brakes.

Almost none of these are things that could be seen even with normal video analysis.

[...]

Rather than just eating their Wheaties like Bruce Jenner, they guzzle beet juice before a workout, because their team of nutritionists has determined that the nitrates it contains can improve aerobic exercise performance by as much as 2 percent. They don’t just rub Bengay on tired muscles, they follow elaborate hydrotherapy regimens to limit muscle damage and reduce soreness by 16 percent. And instead of pounding out hour after hour of training, they sometimes do a targeted workout of insanely high intensity, approved by their physiologists, which can give them better results in as little as four minutes.

The entire article has just one passing reference to performance-enhancing drugs — as something the Soviets foisted on some their athletes.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Your E-Book Is Reading You

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book, but with e-book readers they do:

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.

[...]

Some of the findings confirm what retailers already know by glancing at the best-seller lists. For example, Nook users who buy the first book in a popular series like “Fifty Shades of Grey” or “Divergent,” a young-adult series by Veronica Roth, tend to tear through all the books in the series, almost as if they were reading a single novel.

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

Those insights are already shaping the types of books that Barnes & Noble sells on its Nook. Mr. Hilt says that when the data showed that Nook readers routinely quit long works of nonfiction, the company began looking for ways to engage readers in nonfiction and long-form journalism. They decided to launch “Nook Snaps,” short works on topics ranging from weight loss and religion to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features, Mr. Hilt says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series.

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | No Comments »

Hantz Farms

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

Hantz Farms‘ business plan — creating an urban farm in the middle of blighted Detroit for the purposes of education and tourism — doesn’t appear to make much sense. That’s how its promotional video describes the venture:

An older Fortune piece eventually gets to the point:

Hantz says he’s willing to put up the entire $30 million investment himself — all cash, no debt — and immediately begin hiring locally for full-time positions. But he wants two things first from Jackson at the DEGC: free tax-delinquent land, which he’ll combine with his own purchases, he says (he’s aiming for an average cost of $3,000 per acre, in line with rural farmland in southern Michigan), and a zoning adjustment that would create a new, lower tax rate for agriculture. There’s no deal yet, but neither request strikes Jackson as unattainable. “If we have reasonable due diligence,” he says, “I think we’ll give it a shot.”

So, much of the land would be free — and taxed at the lower agricultural rate — which is 18 mills lower.

His stated goal is to create scarcity, so that property values go up — but creating scarcity doesn’t create wealth, even if it can transfer quite a bit.

Putting that land under new management though, that could create value. But that involves a political battle:

“I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Beating Anderson Silva

Friday, July 6th, 2012

Jack Slack has produced a thorough analysis of how to beat Anderson Silva:

Something which should have become apparent in Anderson Silva’s fights with Demian Maia, Patrick Cote and Thales Leites is that Silva is almost completely averse to leading. Leading, in striking terms, is to attack first, and it is something which Anderson Silva very rarely does with the actual intention of hurting his opponent. Most of Anderson’s leads are simply intended to draw an attack from the opponent which he can counter without worrying about being taken down.

The reasons for this are two-fold: Silva does his best work on the counter, and Silva’s early career was plagued by being taken down off of his offense. Daiju Takase took Silva down as Silva lunged at him with a jab, as did Tetsuji Kato. In fact much of Anderson Silva’s earlier career was spent on the offensive, backing opponents into corners and winging punches at them, attempting to physically stuff their shots as they dived under his punches. It was a very hit and miss game, and is completely alien when watched next to the Anderson Silva of today.

Notice here, against Tetsuji Kato, Anderson is trying to implement a traditional sprawl and brawl strategy, rather than his modern, movement based one. In the octagon, Anderson has been able to develop a style in which he can simply move backward and try to draw his opponent’s strikes. In the ring and during his pre-UFC career, the traditional mindset was that strikers should go foward, cut off the ring, attack, and try to sprawl on the opponent. Wanderlei Silva and Cro Cop were enormously strong and able to pummel for underhooks on anyone. Anderson, a much less stocky fighter, struggled with this. Notice how he throws a body kick from far too close, which Kato simply smothers and takes him down off of.

Improvements in wrestling skill did not alleviate this problem, improvements in strategy did. Silva very rarely leads with commited strikes today. Anderson’s sprawl looks excellent when he is defending a wild shot, but he is not a great sprawler while on offense. You will notice that when Silva’s opponents do not lead, he tends to stick to long, showy strikes that cause little physical damage but win him points with the hope that this will force the opponent to come forward later in the fight. He will very rarely step in with power strikes against an opponent who has not acted first. Some of Anderson’s signature leads are the long jab, the thrust kick to the knee and the spinning back kick. All very long techniques which are hard for the opponent to score the takedown off of.

The top two frames show Anderson’s modern kicking game against competent grapplers — focusing on the calf. A kick on the thigh can be caught or forced to ride up the leg into the hand of the opponent, Anderson does this himself (most notably against James Irvin), but a kick on the calf is almost impossible to catch. Also the distance between the two fighters is much greater — giving Silva time to sprawl without committing too much to the attack. The middle left frame shows Silva’s spinning back kick — a powerful strike which forces the opponent to stay at a distance. It is very hard to smother a spinning back kick and clinch — the kick is simply too powerful and long.

The middle right frame shows another low, low kick — this time to the shin of Maia. This kick is rather counter-intuitive because it is a shin on shin collision — something that is to be avoided at all costs in Muay Thai — but it scored points. The bottom left frame shows Anderson’s jab — notice how far back his hips are as he leans forward at the waist. This is not a powerful jab, or one that is correct by traditional standards — but if Maia attempts to duck under and shoot (as most grapplers would) Anderson is already half way to a sprawl. All he needs to do is move his front leg back, level with his rear leg and Maia will have an impossible task in finishing his shot. This is an important development in Andersons game — Daiju Takase took Anderson down as Anderson attempted to land a powerful jab. Anderson sprawled on Takase, but was unsuccessful and was taken down and submitted. His modern jab, which is not a committed power punch, makes it much easier for Anderson to sprawl effectively by keeping his hips away from his opponent. The final frame is Anderson’s side kick to the knee — Bruce lee was a major proponent of this technique because it is the longest technique against the closest target. It is also almost impossible to catch.

While there is no denying that Silva’s wrestling has improved, the vast majority of improvement have come from his counter-striking style against grapplers. They cannot shoot from out in the open because Anderson can simply run backwards, they cannot corner him because there are no sharp corners in the octagon (unlike in Anderson’s early career), and so they are forced to strike their way towards him. Often they do this by timidly jabbing which normally results in Silva mugging and avoiding all their blows. After Silva had dropped a round to Chael Sonnen, he came out for the second round with a visible urgency; immediately throwing power punches at Sonnen. As soon as he threw a hard kick, Sonnen took him down with ease. This wasn’t Sonnen’s elite wresting, this was Anderson’s tactical error. As Silva was flustered and needed to make up for a dismal first round, he abandoned the safe tactics which have made him such a force against most grapplers.

Notice how Anderson is clearly too close to kick safely, yet does so because he is flustered and wants to hurt Sonnen. The kick connects before it reaches it’s ideal velocity and rotation, and is therefore muffled and easy for Sonnen to catch.

Anderson Silva’s refusal to strike first is an integral part of his style, and when he does lead it is almost always with techniques designed to keep his weight away from the opponent and encourage them to strike back at him. This reluctance to lead does not hurt Silva in most fights because nobody is going to outpoint Silva, and point deductions for inactivity are very rare. Patrick Cote attempted to force Silva to lead, but ultimately accomplished little.

Is there any way this reluctance to lead can be exploited? Not really. But if Anderson can be flustered, by dropping a round convincingly, he will be forced to lead — and that will expose him to the takedowns that he avoids so well when he is patient.

There’s much more.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

Sporty Logos for the Great Houses of Westeros

Friday, July 6th, 2012

The artist known as Vanadium has produced a line of Game of Thrones t-shirts with sporty logos:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Why Charity is Evil

Friday, July 6th, 2012

James Lafond explains why charity is evil:

Charity serves one purpose and one purpose only: to make the giver feel good about themselves. The nobility of medieval Europe admitted that this was the case, so intentionally took no steps to improve the lot of the poor. After all if there were no poor to beg than what opportunities would be left for the nobility to pave their way to heaven? Most Moslems were too far away to conveniently kill. There weren’t enough intellectually inclined people to be labeled as heretics and hunted down in local crusades. And the Jews just seemed to be getting scarcer all the time. So, with so few readily available victims to be slain for God, charity was the default option into heaven.

Now, that might seem awful to you. But really, at least medieval man-butcher philanthropists were honest. Modern charity-givers would actually have us believe that they are doing it for those they give to; even espousing the cause of elevating the poor to their own level. The fact is people give to charity and to the punk skipping school and heading out to score some weed, for the same reason why good looking people like to have sex with the lights on, because it makes them feel good about themselves.

This modern combination of giving to the poor and also telling them that it is their right not to be poor, while making no demands on them, has cultivated a culture of intimidation. You see, ancient peasants knew that accepting charity confirmed their inferior status. The bums of the modern world know no such thing.

As a Darwinist, with full knowledge that charity is evil and that giving is nothing more than an attempt by the giver to either find comfort in submitting to mild aggression or feel good about giving, I accept that all who are willing to so give and so submit deserve to be preyed upon. These heaven-bound people have self-selected themselves as prey items on the earthly social menu. I suppose martyrdom, even of this anemic variety, does have its appeal.

Just remember that if you have decided to play such a minor league martyr than you have consigned some of those who are weaker than yourself to intimidation and the entire spectrum of violent crime that grows in its fertile soil.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

They messed with the wrong girl

Friday, July 6th, 2012

Priscilla Dang sounds unwise, but that doesn’t mean her story isn’t entertaining:

Dang was on a run in a Vancouver, Wash., neighborhood last Friday when two teenagers on bikes, one 16, the other 18, approached her from behind. “One went in front and made eye contact with me like a smirk, like I thought he was saying ‘Hi,’” said Dang of the encounter to KATU. “The next thing I knew I was pretty much groped on my bottom behind left side.”

Unfortunately for the alleged gropers, the 23-year-old woman has taken kung-fu lessons since she was 5. Her family owns the Summit Wushu Academy, an Oregon martial arts studio.

She instantly pushed one of the teenagers to the ground and made him apologize. When the second teenager called her a derogatory term, Dang says she snapped, hitting him in the face several times while simultaneously dodging his punches. According to The Columbian, when he pulled out a knife she used his bike as a shield until a passerby showed up and called 911.

“I think they knew they messed with the wrong girl,” Dang added to KATU.

Both suspects fled the scene and were later apprehended by sheriff’s deputies, reports KPTV. The 18-year-old suspect is now facing fourth-degree assault charges, while the 16-year-old will be judged by a juvenile prosecutor.

Washington law defines assault in the fourth degree rather unhelpfully:

(1) A person is guilty of assault in the fourth degree if, under circumstances not amounting to assault in the first, second, or third degree, or custodial assault, he or she assaults another.

Posted in Crime, Martial Arts | No Comments »

Jonathan Haidt Knows Why We Fight

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Who is Jon Haidt?

A nice Jewish boy from central casting, he grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. His father was a corporate lawyer. “When the economy opened out in the ’50s and ’60s and Jews could go everywhere, he was part of that generation. He and all his buddies from Brooklyn did very well.”

His family was liberal in the FDR tradition. At Yale he studied philosophy and, in standard liberal fashion, “emerged pretty convinced that I was right about everything.” It took a while for him to discover the limits of that stance. “I wouldn’t say I was mugged by reality. I would say I was gradually introduced to it academically,” he says today.

In India, where he performed field studies early in his professional career, he encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal. Yet it worked and the people were lovely. In Brazil, he paid attention to the experiences of street children and discovered the “most dangerous person in the world is mom’s boyfriend. When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped,” he says. “The right is right to be sounding the alarm about the decline of marriage, and the left is wrong to say, ‘Oh, any kind of family is OK.’ It’s not OK.”

At age 41, he decided to try to understand what conservatives think. The quest was part of his effort to apply his understanding of moral psychology to politics. He especially sings the praises of Thomas Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions,” which he calls “an incredible book, a brilliant portrayal” of the argument between conservatives and liberals about the nature of man. “Again, as a moral psychologist, I had to say the constrained vision [of human nature] is correct.”

That is, our moral instincts are tribal, adaptive, intuitive and shaped by evolution to strengthen “us” against “them.” He notes that, in the 1970s, the left tended to be categorically hostile to evolutionary explanations of human behavior. Yet Mr. Haidt, the liberal and self-professed atheist, says he now finds the conservative vision speaks more insightfully to our evolved nature in ways that it would be self-defeating to discount.

“This is what I’m trying to argue for, and this is what I feel I’ve discovered from reading a lot of the sociology,” he continues. “You need loyalty, authority and sanctity” — values that liberals are often suspicious of — “to run a decent society.”

[...]

In his book, for instance, is passing reference to Western Europe’s creation of the world’s “first atheistic societies,” also “the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have very few).”

What does he actually mean? He means Islam: “Demographic curves are very hard to bend,” he says. “Unless something changes in Europe in the next century, it will eventually be a Muslim continent. Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree. Islam, in its holy books, seems more so. Christianity has undergone a reformation and gotten some distance from its holy books to allow many different lives to flourish in Christian societies, and this has not happened in Islam.”

Mr. Haidt is similarly tentative in spelling out his thoughts on global warming. The threat is real, he suspects, and perhaps serious. “But the left is now embracing this as their sacred issue, which guarantees that there will be frequent exaggerations and minor — I don’t want to call it fudging of data — but there will be frequent mini-scandals. Because it’s a moral crusade, the left is going to have difficulty thinking clearly about what to do.”

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

The Race to Modernize the America’s Cup

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

The Wall Street Journal describes the race to modernize the America’s Cup:

The 34th America’s Cup next year in San Francisco Bay will be raced in AC72s, a brand-new wingsailed, multihull boat. There hasn’t been such a radical redesign in two decades, if ever. The 2013 match will also be the first that’s truly visible, both physically (we’ll be able to watch the whole race from land) and in spirit. They’ve decided to use technology to make real-time race decisions and competitor progress transparent to fans. “It’s taken 160 years to reach some of these quite obvious conclusions,” Russell Coutts, chief executive and helmsman of Oracle Racing, told me. “This industry was so secretive before.”

Now sailing is getting less opaque and more nimble, onboard and off. July 1 is the first day that Sweden, New Zealand, France, Italy, Korea and the defender of the cup, Oracle Team USA, are allowed to launch their 72-foot-long catamarans into the bay, to start practicing for next year—and these new cats can go 40 knots. That’s almost 50 miles per hour.

Meanwhile, convincingly, the LiveLine technology of the U.S. America’s Cup team recently won an Emmy award “for extraordinary innovation in sports.” Superimposing geo-positioned graphics and data streams over live race video, LiveLine “paints” virtual boundary, finish and ahead-and-behind lines on the water during a broadcast.

This live-televised technology was pioneered with hockey in 1996, to track the puck. Then came the yellow first-down line in football, the virtual strike zone in baseball and Nascar tracking. It’s a bit trickier applied to sailing, with video shot from a moving helicopter. But LiveLine’s GPS can still track the America’s Cup boats to within 2 centimeters. LiveLine constantly adjusts for hue, too (water color fluctuates in a way AstroTurf does not), recognizing what is fluid and what isn’t, to avoid “painting” a line over a boat or a buoy.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

A Quiet WeedWacker

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

The scythe is making a quiet comeback:

In the dozens just 10 years ago, U.S. scythe sales are nearing 10,000 a year now, for a kit that costs about $200. Predictably, scythe buyers are small, green farmers; unpredictably, they are also city folk and suburbanites.

At Marugg Co., which has been selling scythes out of Tracy City, Tenn., since 1873, the typical scythe buyer used to be an Amish farmer or a horror-movie prop master, according to Amy Wilson, the current owner. Now, it’s “anybody and everybody,” she says. “It makes it difficult for advertising, but still…”

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Laser-Induced Plasma Channel

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

Picatinny engineers are devising a Laser-Induced Plasma Channel weapon that shoots lightning bolts — and it sounds awesome:

“If a laser beam is intense enough, its electro-magnetic field is strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules, creating plasma,” said Fischer. “This plasma is located along the path of the laser beam, so we can direct it wherever we want by moving a mirror.”

“Air is composed of neutral molecules and is an insulator,” Fischer said. When lightning from a thunderstorm leaps from cloud to ground, it behaves just as any other sources of electrical energy and follows the path of least resistance.

“The plasma channel conducts electricity way better than un-ionized air, so if we set up the laser so that the filament comes near a high voltage source, the electrical energy will travel down the filament,” Fischer elaborated.

A target, an enemy vehicle or even some types of unexploded ordnance, would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on. Since the voltage drop across the target would be the same as the voltage drop across the same distance of ground, current flows through the target. In the case of unexploded ordnance, it would detonate, explained Fischer.

Even though the physics behind the project is sound, the technical challenges were many, Fischer recalled.

Posted in Technology, Weapons | No Comments »

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