Dead Heat

Filing under Interesting, Really Rather.

After the three way tie for second between Michael Phelps, Chad Le Clos and László Cseh in the 100m butterfly, you might wonder why the swimming authorities don’t work to thousandths rather than hundredths of a second to separate these athletes.

vhnyosu7cov82wynjmxl

Well, the simple answer is: they can’t.

For the record:

In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel.

And while that might not seem like a lot (because it isn’t), we are talking about the best swimmers in the world, at the most important swimming event in the world, so these tiny margins count for a lot.

The trouble is, while our swimmers are pushing boundaries all over the place, our pool builders haven’t quite attained the same sort of levels.

FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim.

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and that potential 3cm variation amounts to 12.5523012552 thousandths of a second. That’s 1.25523012552 hundredths of a second. And that explains why timing to thousandths of a second wouldn’t actually be fair. But it’s not like we can do anything about it:

Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.

Of course, there are some sports that do time to thousandths of a second – like track cycling and bobsleigh – but the important difference here is that all the athletes compete on the same track. No danger there of Lane 4 being 3cm shorter than Lane 5 (or whatever). If the track isn’t quite the correct length, well, there’s no advantage for any one athlete: it’s the same for everyone.

One anomaly here: speed skating: Yes, they use the same track, but they’re so backward in using a starting pistol to begin races that some competitors definitely start at a disadvantage…

Virus Vrydag

Alliteration because this is a post about viruses. And it is a Friday. And Vrydag is Friday in Afrikaans.
Also Virus is Virus in Afrikaans. So we’re all good.

My inbox was full of posts and articles about viruses today. Real viruses, not digital ones. I’m not sure what prompted this outbreak, but if you have even a passing interest in microbiology and biomedical science, they’re quite interesting.

First up, a two-parter: this TED-talk from CSIR laser scientist Patience Mthunzi.

Could we cure HIV with lasers?

and this response:
Fullscreen capture 2016-08-12 105612 AM.bmp

because, as UCT virus scientist Ed Rybicki says:

Sorry, and I realise that she’s a passionate and well-meaning woman who has a TED talk and everything, but this idea is right up there with using electrotherapy to treat HIV infections. In short, it might work at the single-cell level, but is hopelessly impractical to use on whole people.

Eina.

Next up: Polio is back in Nigeria.

After more than two years without wild poliovirus in Nigeria, the Government reported today that 2 children have been paralyzed by the disease in the northern Borno state.

A huge push on a very successful worldwide vaccine programme against polio has yielded incredible results. It does/did appear that polio is/was heading the same way as smallpox.

Polio_cases_over_time.svg

But continuing religious opposition, together with political upheaval in northern Nigeria has meant that the campaign has been failing at local level. These two cases, which have resulted in two children being paralysed for life, are both a setback and a reminder that we’re not quite there yet and that any thoughts of eradication were decidedly, and sadly, premature.

Room for one more? Good. Because it’s really interesting.

It’s a long one, but if you want to try to take some positives away from the West Africa Ebola Outbreak which began 2 years ago this month (yes, I know), then it would be the lessons that we have learned about how to contain future outbreaks. Not just Ebola outbreaks, but any outbreaks. Especially those in the developing world.

These lessons will stand us in better stead when the next challenge arises, says the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Professor David Heymann:

“By using language that they could understand we were able to get communities to work very rapidly to stop transmission,” said Prof Heymann, who feels this was not the initial priority in West Africa. “We’re too biomedical in all our approaches, but we’ve learned that community engagement is the key as we’ve gone along.”

“If communities can be empowered with understanding about how to bury their own people safely and how to prevent themselves getting infected, outbreaks can be stopped. That’s how they’ve been stopped in the past and will be stopped in the future.”

Much of this isn’t rocket science. In fact, none of it it is rocket science. Rocket science isn’t going to help you prevent the spread of a killer virus in West Africa. Getting to the moon, perhaps. But telling scared villagers how they can avoid dying from a seemingly unstoppable disease process? No. This basically comes down to using the correct language (something we’ve talked about before on the blog) and going through the correct channels. In effect, just communicating effectively.

If that’s the rather simple foundation for a more successful response to the next outbreak – whatever that might be – then lives are going to be saved. And that’s obviously a very good thing.

Prisma Beagle 

It was the Ad Wizard who introduced me to Prisma “Turn your photos into awesome artwork”, but it was ever so laggy and that was off-putting.

Now though, there’s been an update and the blockages seem to have been removed.

      
Cue a pencil drawing and a van Goghy kind of effort of the beagle. The beagle looks fairly unimpressed with the whole thing.

I’m fairly sure that I won’t use Prisma for anything important, nor necessarily make any “awesome artwork”, but it’s kind of fun and the kids love what I’ve done with the dog.

Prisma on Google Play Store

Summed up

Because tomorrow is a public holiday, and because today was a school holiday, we skived off work. And I was up late this morning. Nice.
Since then, I’ve got close to very little done. If I was looking for a photo to use an analogy for the day, then this would be it.

It’s not often that Colin and I see eye to eye, but this pretty much sums up my attitude to Monday 8th August 2016.
Unashamedly so, too.

Later, because of the clear skies, and fueled by Castle Milk Stout and some (or more) Klipdrift, I intend to continue Project Night Sky Photography.

Watch this space for spectacular results, or, more likely, save your time and don’t.

1811 – Extraordinary

The Manx Nostalgia group I’m a member of on Facebook is generally a succession of comments about “it’s a shame that [place] has been redeveloped now” or that “it’s a shame that [place] has fallen into such disrepair”.
The positive nostalgia is sadly lacking.

Still, it does, on occasion, come up with some interesting moments.
Here’s one now:

Fullscreen capture 2016-08-04 021452 PM.bmp

First off, Pooilvaaish (to give it the correct spelling) is still a place: a small collection of dwellings on the eastern side of Bay Ny Carrickey, with beautiful views across towards Port St Mary, and the mouth of the harbour where John Comish perished. Interestingly, its name translates from Manx Gaelic as “Pool of Death”. Nice. 

And secondly, yes, there are newspapers from back then, although there’s no mention of what happened to John Comish. There is a lot about a tremendous and devastating storm which occurred “Tuesday last”, and which mentions PSM harbour, but that was the 24th September – the 22nd was a Sunday. So, (not having done a lot of further digging) I can’t see anything specific about his death.

However, that newspaper report is still worth a nice long read, as it does include some other really interesting stuff:

Fullscreen capture 2016-08-04 023331 PM.bmp

Let’s get them documented:

  • Naval Longevity: It is a singular fact, that the united ages of the ten first admirals on the list of our naval heroes, amount to 814 years. This circumstance shows that fighting is not a very unhealthy employment.

Either that or pickling with rum is a very effective preservative.

  • Extraordinary Shot: Friday, Mr Levi Larkham, who holds the deputation of Radipole Farm, under I.H. Browne, Esq. killed a hare running and a brace of partridges, at one shot.

Eenhaasentweepatrysemeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein? That’s almost as good as Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein.

But then there was this:

  • Extraordinary growth of a Potatoe: There was last week taken up in a field near Ely, Cambridgeshire, a potatoe, which was of such extraordinary size, the when whole, it would not go into a bushel measure, and when cut in pieces, of the bigness of middling-sized potatoes, it nearly filled the bushel measure.

It could be straight out of Blackadder. It could have been the inspiration for Baldrick and his turnips. It probably was the inspiration for Baldrick and his turnips. I’m just sad that it happened 80 years too early for photos to be taken.

The fact that these 3 pieces of “light-hearted”, trivial news made it into the one page of the newspaper suggests to me that either the editorial staff weren’t really that concerned about other, more serious news, or more likely, that there actually was very little going on in the Isle of Man. That latter fact hasn’t really changed much in the intervening 200 or so years, as this other post, including connections to both the Isle of Man and potatoes, demonstrated.