If you're one of our twelve readers, you may remember this entry by Larry B, where he points out Easterbrook's inane rejection of decimal times for measuring speed at the NFL Combine. Now that pretentious d-bag is at it again (Easterbrook, not Larry B):
In other Olympic news, the timer said Michael Phelps swam the 100-meter butterfly in 50.58 seconds, Milorad Cavic swam it in 50.59 -- can anyone seriously believe either finished one-hundredth of a second different from the other?
I think most people find it much easier to believe that two different swimmers didn't finish at the exact same fucking time.
The timer said Britta Steffen swam the 50-meter freestyle one-hundredth of a second faster than Supermom Dara Torres.
Allowing for a winner and loser to be determined. Damn this backward system!
Tenths of seconds are absurd enough, as Tuesday Morning Quarterback noted a few months ago.
Noted with completely idiotic logic, mind you.
A hundredth of a second is too fleeting to have any common-sense relevance, let alone decide an athletic event;
TMQ is therefore in favor of a large number of swimming and track events ending in 3 way ties.
and this is setting aside whether a mechanical device splashed with water (the touch pads) can be accurate to the hundredth of the second.
Technologies Easterbrook is willing to put his faith in:
1. A brake pedal that slows your car down as you apply pressure to it.
2. Keyboards, which make letters appear as you type them.
3. The snooze button on an alarm clock which instantly cuts the sound off when touched.
Technologies Easterbrook does not believe in:
A giant stop watch connected to a touch pad.
Yet numerous clocks in Beijing show hundredths of seconds, as if these splinters of time can be measured meaningfully.
Again, Easterbrook doesn't think that assigning winners and losers is meaningful for Olympic games.
Reader Fred Ruonala notes that as the Phelps result was announced, one of the NBC announcers said viewers could "clearly see Phelps touched first." Now Olympics announcers can perceive hundredths of seconds.
Or as you point out, they probably can't. Therefore, we need some other system besides the naked eye. How about, oh I don't know, maybe a giant stopwatch connected to touch pads? Nah.
I have never read a single one of Gregg Easterbrook's TMQ columns but if he is this much of an idiot, I may start paying more attention.
ReplyDeleteI would love to know how he would propose you determine the winner of a race if a giant touchpad does not work? Does he want the race to be declared a tie and then the racers who tied have to find a red flag located at the bottom of the pool and then be the first to ring a bell that puts slime on their head? It worked for Double Dare, why can't the Olympics do it?
I literally stopped reading the article when he started deriding the timing. it's almost as if he doesn't believe that time outside of whole seconds doesn't exist. He has turned into a complete pompus ahole.
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily disagree with the general thrust of his point re: the combine since 40 times, imo are totally over-valued by GM's approaching the draft, and the relative unimportance of 40 time's for skill players notwithstanding the concept that 4 tenths of a second on a 40 yard dash is the difference between a pro bowler and a no bowler is ridiculous to me.
ReplyDeleteThat said his process of decrying accuracy is retarded and the fucking concept that it's "impossible to measure 10ths of a second is retarded" unless you want to get into super-advanced physics and talk about "well just measuring things that small changes them too much for reliability" which is both impractical and retarded (AND probably improperly implied by English-major-me)
I'm not an expert on physics, but I'm pretty sure the Heisenberg principle applies at a level a hell of a lot smaller than hundredths of a second.
ReplyDeleteI agree. It's retarded. You can't just attack scientific measurement and expect not to get ripped by people who know what VORP is.
dan-bob as usual is correct. For something like a hand touching a wall or a foot crossing a line, the uncertainty principle applies at about the level of 10^-30 seconds. The real question is the accuracy of the detectors, which are probably accurate to one thousandth of a second, making one hundredth of a second significantly different. I think Easterbrook wants either a coin toss or a heated best-of-three rock paper scissors match to decide the champion, as he doesn't believe in modern technology. Also, this begins my return as a semi-regular commenter on fjm.
ReplyDeleteWhen that NBC announcer said that you could clearly see that Phelps won the race, he wouldn't possibly be benefiting from that strange technical phenomenon known as SLOW MOTION REPLAY? Or even, heaven forbid... FREEZE FRAMES?
ReplyDeleteTechnology is crazy. Next thing you know, they'll be using touch pads connected to timers in order to determine the winner of a swimming race!
I agree that I don't have a ton of confidence (though I have some) that the clocks are exactly accurate in the context of time measurement (the time between touching the pad and the pad registering the touch), but how can you question their usefulness in determining who touched first?
ReplyDelete