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Playing Ball in Space
oo7tushar writes "Although most experiments in space seem simple they have profound results. Take this for example, astronauts trying to catch a ball in space. What's so hard about that? Nothing much really, down here on Earth. In space it's a completely different story.
Here on earth our eyes see the ball and our brain anticipates it's movement according to gravity. In space the brain continues to anticpate gravity but unlike motion sickness (which is adapted to within days), astronauts continue to anticipate the path of a ball for 15 days (after which they start to show progress).
What are the ramifications? The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model."
But is it 9.80 m/s/s or 32 ft/s/s in our heads?
Jouster
this article. Oh well..
proton != antielectron
Does that explain why a dozen pints of guinness seems to amplify earths gravity to the point that I can't pick myself up off the bar or floor?
about us having a "gravitation model" in our heads.
Surely it's just called "experience"?
Tom Newton
until you get paid to play catch in space.
Is that a cool job or what?
I am a Karma Library.
Ok, "PhysicsGenius", but have you considered that perhaps the system can be at the same time fundamental and NOT have g hard-coded in it?
What are the ramifications? The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model."
Er, no, maybe it has some capacity to learn the way things move, which surprisingly, after 30-odd years of the same observed behaviour, proves a little hard to unlearn.
The ramifications? Well, people are going to, like have to, like, train for the new environment! Quick, call the cops!
An internal gravitation model would be theorizing far more than is necesarry to account for the data. In cognitive science, there has long been an understanding of encoding specificity. This simply means that data, including skill knowledge, is best retrieved from human memory under the same conditions which it was learned.
An example from the real world is underwater welding. When underwater welders were first being trained, the companies tried to simply train professional welders in all the ways that underwater welding was different from normal welding. But, in diong this, they found that when they were underwater, the welders had serious trouble calling on those skills which supposedly transferred over unchanged. As a result, they had to be entirely retrained in skills they had apparently already learned.
Similarly, if you lose your keys while you're stoned and then can't find them the next day. Psychological evidence shows that your best chance to find them is to get stoned again and then look for them.
Any number of other controlled psychological experiments have been performed to domonstrate this same effect(memorizing words under different lighting conditions, etc.). I don't see why gravitation would be any different.
lysergically yours
It could be that a baby born in space would not have such models. I'm guessing that is a learned response of the brain, not an inherited one. I took a Psychology of learning class in college once, and i learned many interesting things. For one, spacial perceptions depend a lot on the environment in which you are raised. For instance, if you live in a rectangular type house, you can generally make good guesses as to the dimensions of other rectangular shaped rooms. If you bring that person into a round room, the estimations are way off. It works in reverse, too. If you live in a round hut your entire life, you won't be able to make good guesses about rectangular rooms. Seems kinda analogous to the gravity story. I say we get some randy astronauts to give birth on the space station, and kinda have a truman show in space. We'll see how that baby will catch a ball then.
today is spelling optional day.
isn't this more or less just like another optical illusion. Our brains are "wired" or just merely used to seeing things one way, so when something suddenly goes wrong, our brain simply pretends everything's normal. Internal gravity mechanism? hmmph, just call it millions of years living on a planet with constant gravity.
It's possible that the astronauts did adapt to 0-g, and then readapted back to 1-g again. It's also possible that the brain is able to learn and retain multiple models of acceleration. In different situations, it might simply choose which one to apply. That, in fact, is what McIntyre and his colleagues believe is going on.
Really?
I'm sure most of you, like me, consider ball games and other sports the opiate of Joe Sixpack, something to keep his tiny monkey brain diverted from the shallow pain of his useless existence, something to talk about with the other Joe Sixpacks during breaks from the assembly line, but totally useless in expanding knowledge and conquering space. Come on, this is slashdot, lets talk about physics and orbital mechanics, and leave the sporty stuff for stupider, more physically fit sorts.
Unless of course, Rob and company are trying to broaden the
One person in the article asks, "If you anticipate gravity, then why?" Isn't it like anything else? We deal with situations involving gravity for (at least for most people) 100% of our lives. Like anything else done on a day-in day-out basis, we program ourselves to react to situations as they would usually happen. Things like walking, throwing, catching, hand-eye coordination and in this case, predicting how things fall, for most people, become instinct at a certain point in your life. Catching and throwing a ball is fairly instinctual (e.g. you do not go through a concious thought process of moving your hands, etc.), so it shouldn't be surprising that your brain has trouble rewiring itself to adapt to a situation that it has never seen exceptions (such as no gravity) to before.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Just more kudos to Harry Potter, who can catch that Snitch even though it seems completely unaffected by gravity.
Now I think would be a good time to propose a Quidditch Module to be added to the International Space Station. Then all the funding countries could make teams and send them up.
It's a remarkable parallel to playing the game of badminton. The air resistance of the shuttlecock is much higher than that of a normal ball, so the flight trajectory is not what a person used to playing other games would expect. As a result a novice player has an adjustment period before he can really anticipate where a shot is going to go.
It takes 100 million years to learn to adapt to a new strength of gravity? I suppose that's why they can start to make progress in just 15 days.
And on top of all that, even if any of that was correct g hasn't changed that much. Can you explain why g isn't much different on the equator than at the poles?
Anyway, I know IHBT, but I just wanted to make sure no one else buys into this.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Also, I'm guessing these guys are in their thirties. Now, had they been in a weightless environmentr for those 30 odd years they could easily catch a ball in those conditions, but I bet they'd fail to do it in our gravity.
This isn't an "inbuilt" ability, its practise
Get the EULA T-shirt
That should have been:
<Cough>Bull Shit!</Cough>
Whenever the jocks threw balls at the geeks at school, they never caught them either
If fluids in the ear are what help us for balance and orientation, why _wouldn't_ it be able to compensate for gravity? Once the nausea has been overcome for lack of gravity, all of your other orientation skills (ie gravitational compensation for prediction of a ball) should follow suit. The nausea stage is where you're body is trying to adjust, I'd assume that the mind is doing the same.
Karma: Non-Heinous
NASA geeks just suck at playing catch.
but tacos link goes to his home page, insted of his e-mail. Oh well, as long as hits on his web page are more important, then i dont feel guilty about karma whoring.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/18/205
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
And again, I say, so what? It takes the human body a while to accustomise yourself to a new environment, this is hardly breaking news!
Any SysAdmin who has gone from Solaris to AIX could tell you exactly the same thing! :-)
I have to ask why this had to go to space? Surely it would have been possible to construct a target moving on a wire (or some such) which the subject has to grab? You can then move the target with constant speed/acceleration as required. It would also allow you to have an acceleration > g to test if adaptation is faster when you miss the target.
No matter what it looks like, there isn't a
"The question is," he said, "if you do anticipate gravity, then why?"
Because you've spent your entire life living in a gravity well!
This is not the sig you are looking for...
YO!
I GOT NEXT!!!
*sound of ball boucing*
Sent from your iPad.
True, but couldn't we just break into their homes and install Mandrake or Debian on their computers while they sleep?
its easy. For anyone who has been totally wasted, you know that all sense of gravity seems to be scewed. That way the only thing working against you is keeping from passing out, and the mental capacity of maybe 1/10th your normal capacity. So other then the fact that when you hurl it won't be as easy to find (It doesn't just go down and hit the ground) You would have a great advantage over everyone else in your allstar baseball-in-space .... right? right?
Err, what?
You claim a 50% INCREASE in g due to higher centrifugal force (current is 9.8ms^-2). This is clearly nonsense. Also: "100 million years ago the Earth's day was only about 18 hours long." is very unlikely - The geology doesn't bear it out at all (and yes I do have a degree in geology, so I may know what I'm on about).
Even if our day lasted only 12 current hours, that would not result in 50% of our current gravity - the mass of the earth masks any such effect. The variation of g from the pole (no angular motion) to the equator (max angular motion) is only about 0.6ms^-2.
Finally, there's no such thing as centrifugal force - it's simply the tendency of objects to continue in a straight line. Any high school student studying physics should be able to tell you that.
*sigh*
I'd be more interested in how well they did learning, for example, to play hacky sack (passing a small, bean-filled leather bag using only your feet). if they had no prior experience with the game, I'd be interested in seeing how well they did, learning it in zero-G; compared to others learning how to do it with normal gravity. That would be a more valid experiment in my book.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
They probably cannot judge the trajectory of the ball because they are too busy laughing their asses off at the guy who threw it, because he is now spinning and flipping uncontrolably.
If it won't boot, Fsck it!
Sorry about that...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
That it took practice is exactly correct. It's like catching a ball from a different quarterback that throws sidearm with his left hand. If the trajectory and acceleration are substantively different, it will take a while to get comfy. I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly.
Honestly, that a coupla of guys with PHDs in Physics couldn't catch a ball doesn't suprise me all that much.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
I was at a convention in Chicago a few weeks ago (at McCormick Place) and they had the escalators turned off. I had to walk up one to get to where I wanted to go. The thing was stopped but upon getting off my mind thought it should still be moving. It felt really queer getting off of the stopped escalator. My point is that I'm sure there's no escalator DNA or anything. It just boils down to experience - much the same for gravity.
A tree planted upside down (like at MassMOCA) will slowly spread its branches upwards. Does _it_ have an internal gravitation model? Methinks not.
Rather, let us say that human reasoning (both conscious and, in the context of anticipating thrown balls, unconscious) is adapted to gravitation. And, as this learning experiment shows, it is neither hard-wired nor high-level if it only takes 15 days to adjust to.
I think before he can claim this, we'd need to see the results of testing on space-born and -bred animals.
John
Has anybody else read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency? (Douglas Adams)
:)
In one passage, I believe Dirk is explaining that we don't give credit to dogs for their ability to perform complex calculus in realtime.
For example, when you play fetch, your dog is able to analyze the trajectory and velocity of a thrown ball. Based on his observation of the throw, he solves a complex three-dimensional physics problem involving a system of differential equations based upon the underlying physics. He does this fast enough that he is able to position himself to catch the ball.
Of course, that's *most* dogs...our dog wasn't so good at catching things. I think he was more of an "arts" dog.
IIRC there is some study about eyesight that seems to think that the brain adjusts within about 2 weeks as well... an experiment was done where people wore glasses that inverted vision, however after 2 weeks the brain had "corrected" this and vision appeared returned to "normal"
IIRC this also led to the conclusion that babies see updside down for the first 2 weeks of there lives before the brain "fixes" the problem....
;-)
of course i could be making it all up
A monkey in every office....
The next time my girlfriend says 'I'm gaining weight' I'm gonna tell her 'Its all in your head, here, look at this article on slashdot.' =P
Can all fish swim?
This would make sense. The human race has lived with the usual parabolic[or, more technically, logarithmic and arctangential and other far more interesting differential equations and stuff, if we dont ignore air resistance] for, well, as long as we have been here. And our ancestors before that lived with it even longer.
In fact, this seems kinda like a duh thing,
According to neuroscientist Joe McIntyre of the College de France, the brain is so accurate because it contains an internal model of gravity. The brain, he says, seems able to anticipate, calculate and compensate for gravitational acceleration -- naturally.
Ans the thing about the infant farther down on the page, well, that practically proves that this gravity intuition has been developed over millions of years by the evolutionary process. Heck, I can sit here and test it with this mouse ball...
very kewl...
I can't remember the source, but there was an experiment done where subjects were forced to wear glasses which inverted their view for 30 days. After ~20 days their eyes compensated and they could see normally. Once they took off the glasses their own vision was inverted for ~20 days before it returned to normal. Surely the "internal gravitational model" is similar to this situation where the brain takes some time to accustom itself to a new environment.
"I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly."
:P
I doubt that: the balls wouldn't come back to you.
... and you learn to deal with motion issues later in life.
This would be especially true with astronauts. A lot of them learned to deal with motion issues as adults during pilot/aviation training in previous careers. For the rest, you learn to deal with motion issues when learning to drive a car or ride a bike.
Contrast this with learning about gravity and trajectory. One learns to catch and throw at a relatively young age (say 1 1/2 to 3 years old). Such learning is deeply embedded and may well take longer to "unlearn."
The article makes it sound like they expect to the gravitational model to be preprogrammed (although the actual scientists may or may not believe this, you gotta love journalists).
I found this comment from the last time the story was posted (somebody else posted the link) by phr2 which seems rather insightful:
"If someone throws you a spinning frisbee, it flies level at about constant speed--aerodynamic lift prevents it from accelerating downward. Yet you can catch it as accurately as a baseball.
I think a more valid conclusion from that experiment might be that free fall makes you clumsy."
If the article was worth repeating, I think that comment is worth reposting.
I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly.
Anyone can juggle in space. It's easy!
Throws ball "up".
Tadaaaa!
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
After 35+ years (how old are these guys) of living under the constant grip of gravity it is not surprising that it takes a couple of weeks to get used to 'zero g' ..
.. it took me a couple months to get back into 'the scene' ..
I remember when my first GF and I split up
we are quicker to adapt to some things than others.
the huge increase in dups is just an upstep to make a dup-less /. one of the special members-only features...
Whose baby did he try this with?!
Of course babies know about heights. That's why there's no market for stair-gates and it's perfectly safe to leave them on tables unattended.
A couple more generations and we will have evolved to the point where we are all born with a knowledge of the dangers of electricity and parents won't have to buy those pesky socket protectors any more.
Idiots.
(In my experience, babies care nothing for the dangers of heights or just about anything else. You can hold them within centimeters of the whirling blades of a jet intake and they don't even flinch.)
Because we don't want you on our planet anymore.
m o n o l i n u x
When little kids are born, they don't know how to walk. It takes a long time for them to learn how to balance themselves and deal with gravity long enough to stand. A lot longer than 15 days usually.
If a human, or somewhat intelligent animal, has been in a certain environment for a long time (say 30 years) they will not easily adapt to drastic changes in thier environment. And may never adapt because they cannot deal with it and are inadvertantly killed.
It's plain and simple. Our minds model whatever things we find or believe are constant forces. It's called learning. We expect to get an F when we randomly scribble on an exam. We expect to be killed if someone is pointing a gun at us. It all comes down to classical conditioning. Simply, we expect the ball to accelerate because that's what it has done for our entire lifetime. How can they say that humans cannot adapt to this when they even admitted that they showed early signs of adaption after 15 days.
-Anonymous Luke
*homer gurgle*
http://windows.scares.us
/. needs some new moderation categories, like -1 Wacko, or -1 Crackpot.
The day was shorter in times past but you'd have to go back to a time a lot further back than
100 million years to find when it was 18 hours long.
The reason the days are slowly getting longer is that the earth is losing angular momentum to the moon which is hence speeding up and slowly moving
further away.
I've seen quotes that around the time of the dinosaurs the days were approx 22-23 hours long.
With people I think it's easy to ascribe this to learning, rather than built-in gravity models. A more interesting example is with animals.
My neighbor's dog (an Australian cattle dog) is fantastic at catching tennis balls. If you throw one, he can go running, look up over his shoulder, and catch the ball in midair over the shoulder. If you throw farther and he gets there too late, he's very good at knowing where it will go on the bounce and doing a flying leap to catch it off the bounce.
If we built a little enclosed park with atmosphere on the moon, I wonder how long it would take him to adapt the model in his brain to calculate the new trajectories? (I guess I believe that even in dogs, it's learned -- of course there weren't any tennis balls bouncing around over evolutionary time scales, and probably not a whole lot of birds falling out of the sky and bouncing in parabolic trajectories either.)
<imagines the shape of breasts for the colonies of women that grow-up in low grav>
:P)
*homer gurgle*
(Forgot to escape my symbols
http://windows.scares.us
Perhaps they did the experiment with the nerdiest batch of astronauts. I can hear the new phrase now... "Ha ha! You throw like an astronaut!"
Now I've seen it all!.
Athletic ability and intellectual ability are two entirely seperate things and are not mutually exclusive by any means. Just because so-called nerds don't engage in sports doesn't make this any less true. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that "nerdiness" and intelligence are often divergent qualities.
I've known many stupid nerds.
I've known many highly intelligent and intellectual people that not only have substantial athletic ability, but also enjoy playing a number of sports whenever they have the time and opportunity.
In fact, there are many people in education that would be quick to point out that athletic success/ability is correlated with academic success (likely because those that succeed in sports also have the drive to succeed in academics and other pursuits).
That doesn't make sense. If someone lob's a ball to me, I can anticipate that it will curve and will land in a certain place.
If someone pitches a ball at me, then I know its not going to curve as much.
I play v-ball, if someone spikes a ball, it ain't curving.
Yes, there is some learning in terms of catching a ball, but I just think those guys up there can't throw/catch.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
its all in the numbers: how fast will they adapt ? is there a difference between different gravity settings (coriolis ...) are there methods to improve the adaptation rate ? what is the difference between children/adults ? between humans/apes/other species ? are there more accurate methods of studying such mental models ?
;)
don't underestimate the seemingly obvious
Working for necessity's mother.
I find it hard to believe that it took 15 days for the astronauts to acclimatize to projectile motion without gravity. Any video game veteran has learned that instinct by interacting with Descent: Freespace, XWing, or even 3D Pong. These video games serve as excellent simulators; the astronauts must have never played any of them.
If aliens invade, I pray that Defender becomes standard training for our fighter pilots.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
come play with my balls and maybe get some oral sex too!
The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model
No, it's what you learned...
Just for funny's sake, let's say we had a baby in space, and taught it how to catch and all that stuff. If you brough the kid back down to earth and did this in reverse, you would reach the conclusion that the brain must have some sort of internal zero-G model built in.
We know so little about the brain and how humans actually 'learn' and store information like catching and walking that it would be silly to try to explain it by saying that there is some 'built-in' model.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Ball bounces off ceiling. Smacks juggler in the head while he is busy patting himself on the back.
The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model.
It's not a model, it's just a reaction. You live all of your life under the earth's gravity, so your brain is used to how things react in that system. The brain doesn't come with, or even learn, some sort of function to calculate gravitational effects, the brain just gets used to the way things happen.
In other words, your brain doesn't see a ball coming at you and do this:
Ball approaching at 40 mph and presently 12 ft altitude.
Based on calculations of gravity and wind resistance, ball will arrive at 35 mph and 4 ft altitude
Move hand to location
It's more like this: Ball approaching. Based on the millions of times I've experienced this, the ball will arrive at about right here (hand goes into place)
~ now you know
I want to see an ISS experiment where they see how Fluffy's desire to always land on his feet translates to a free-fall enviornment.
I thought this stupid thread would've died already, but since it hasn't let's use some high school physics to show how wrong you are.
*Suppose* that 100 million years ago the earth's day were only 18 hours long. I don't know if it was, but suppose that.
Then the measured gravity acceleration would be
g = g_0 - Rw^2, where w is omega (the earth's period)
w = 2pi/64800
g = 9.8 - 6,37e6*(9.7e-5)^2 = 9.8 - 0.06 = 9.74 m/s^2
So I can't see how g could've been about 15.2 m/s^2, because reducing earth's period doesn't make much of a difference (as many people have stated without proof before me).
What amazes me is that you state that g was actually HIGHER (15.2 m/s^2) back in that day. Would you mind elucidating that?
"I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly."
This has already been done. Senator Jake Garn is a juggler, and attempted to juggle while on a space shuttle mission in 1985. They also played with Slinkys, Yo-yos, and Wheel-Os.
Ralph
Then don't do that.
I wasn't paying attention: w isn't the earth's period, but its angular velocity.
numbers would be more akin to software not hardware. The concept of gravity would be hardware the actual numbers would be learned. An environmental factor would be a learned characteristic not an evolved one. Kind of like riding a bike or playing baseball. We have the evolved ability to play these sports, but we have to learn the properties specific to the task.
This is why baseball players can catch balls better. They have practiced and learned the speed at which the ball should fall.
Given enough time in space you could learn a new set of physics to interact with.
This is classic psychology stuff: Is it Nature or Nurture?
with a little genetic engineering, we can all go around floating?
--
Damn burglers, and the comment thief
Umm, your weak, pathetic self is showing--you might want to re-hide that behind the tough veneer of your RailArena character.
You see the phrase "catch a ball" in print and automatically flip out about how "ball games" are for stupid people--that's pretty pathetic.
Get over your weakness and accept that people are good at things that you aren't, and instead of making them dumb, it makes them different from you. All of your supposed intelligence comes off as ignorance (you Joe Sixpack, you) when you make stupid blanket statements like "sports [are] the opiate of Joe Sixpack." Plenty of smart people aren't interested in the least in "physics and orbital mechanics" but are interested in playing or watching sports.
Consider that this article was about astronauts, not baseball players, and was about unlearning gravitational constants and not Jai Ali statistics. Re-read it and post something intelligent. Thanks.
Nice one, good experiment. Just how much plausible sounding but preposterouis bullshit can you fit in 3 sentences and still have people take you seriously ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Finally, something to explain why I suck so much at playing Blitzball in FFX! I knew there had to be a reason...
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
or any other system where gravity is simulated via centripetal forces. You also get coriolis forces in that case and changes in the centripetal forces depending on the distance to the hub.
Apart from being even sicker, playing baseball (like they did on B5) would be very interesting.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
The brain is good a deriving the solution to many classes of Ordinary Linear Differential Equations using presumably numerical methodes. Is it any suprise that humans would create a mental engine optimising the sulutions for problems they encounter often? For example, a bicyclist calculating the reletive future possition of an accelerating auto as it makes a turn, or the trajectory of a baseball in a 1G field. BTW, I remember reading as a kid ( decades ago) a Heinlein story where the main character, a kid from the moon was complaing about having to calculate 1G tragectories while visiting the Earth.
Has been doing "genetic" programming since we were created (IMO, if you think we evolved then just ignore that and continue).
It is observable in babies and that is where scientists got the ideas to write software that did the same thing. Of course this isn't really genetic programming, which suggests that genes evolve in a coherant state. Instead it is a selective process of trial and error. In other words, it's a statistical model.
When we learn to speak, in any language, we start by pattern recognition. "Goo-goo" and "ga-ga" are traditionally the first phonetic patters we recognise. In reallity it's phonetic sounds like "da" and "ma" and "th" which babies start to recognise and duplicate first (at least in English). This is simply because these phonetic sounds are the most frequent.
Gravity is the same way. It is 100% predictable to any child growing up. It's far more amazing that we can build a model of physics from the sound of the crack of a bat, combine it with the gravity equation and the physics of drag in air and then catch the ball than it is that we can predict gravity with our brains. That's one of the simplest equations of all to memorize.
It's also probably the reason it is so hard to unlearn. We grow up thinking it doesn't variate. Then when our eyes give our brains feedback that the equation was wrong when we are on the space shuttle or ISS then our brain doesn't believe it can be wrong at first.
The software works on statistics, when the equation is wrong 100% of the time then our brain re-writes it's nerual "code" to compensate.
Vision is the same way. When you change what you see by inverting it, your brain will eventually adapt and switch it back. It takes about two weeks.
This isn't amazing, it's the way the brain, any brain, works.
Now making a machine that works the same way would be newsworthy.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
IT also builds a mental model of how the ball will travel away from you when struck.
This just takes exposure and practice. (However I could believe that the brain has developed the ability to learn patterns of motion)
During our lives we watch leaves fall, we play ball games, we do the thing out of aliens with the knife. All of this allows our brain to predict how things will happen around us.
Maybe the scientists are right (I really have no educational basis for what I say) but I feel that too often people have a theory, they do an experiment and then merrily claim that the experiment proves the theory. Without exploring the alternatives. (I apologise to scientist types, I do not meen to generalise and I only refer to the "weird" experiments that make it into the main stream press) Cheers.
I'm spent.
My father was never one who was into sports until one day when he felt guilty I guess and bought me a mitt when I was 8 and took me out back to play catch.
Guess what, I sucked. I don't know how long it took me to learn but I tell you what, once in a while someone tosses a set of keys to me across the room and I still can't catch em half the time.
So I don't see why this is a big deal. Now if it was a story about the difficulties of re-learning how to have sex in space, then I'd be interested! (No, my dad didn't teach me that either, thank god)
"I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly."
I doubt that: the balls wouldn't come back to you.
My point wasn't that he could juggle in space. The point is that he would be used to varying rates of speed, direction, and distances. Therefore, his muscle memory would not as rigid in focus as somebody that plays catch with a baseball.
I appreciate the humor, but in this experiment the balls were thrown at them. It was just catching, no throwing.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
This is really no big deal. The internal gravitational model is quite probably learned, possibly during infancy or childhood. This is no different than wearing prism glasses that make you see everything upside down except that the adjustment time is longer. As alnapp said, growing up with a non-Earth gravitational model would likely cause difficulties playing ball here on Earth.
-dbc
how throwing the ball might take some getting used to. "Catch, Pete! Darn, I forgot we don't have gravity. Jump to catch it, Pete!"
But I would think that for catching a ball without gravity would be easier (adjustment-wise.)
But then again, I've never been very good at throwing, compared to catching, anyway. I don't know how many times I've hit my wife in the head, accidentally, of course with something I was throwing to her.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Not that it is feasible (as in cost-effective) to try, but it would be interesting to see how people who catch things professionally would react.
My first hypothesis: professional baseball players would suck at this. Their skills have been honed to as close to perfection as they can get, under the circumstances they encounter, i.e., normal earth gravity. Maybe a catcher would have a better chance since they have to contend with more unpredictable trajectories and a really crappy viewing angle.
My second hypothesis: professional (or even dedicated amateur) jugglers would be better at this from the get go, and would acclimate faster. My wife is a pretty good juggler, and she has taught a lot of people to juggle and pass clubs and torches. It's a dangerous pastime--teaching club passing, that is--you get a lot of hard, spinning things thrown wildly at your head. (You usually don't set them on fire, too, until your student gets the hang of it.)
So, here on earth, my wife can catch any reasonable throw of a spinning club--high, low, straight on--and get a hand on any unreasonable throw--spinning sideways and unintentionally aimed straight at her head--usually without dropping the other clubs she's juggling.
A professional juggler who regularly juggles clubs, balls, rings, chainsaws, kittens, and inflated balloons half full of sand would probably mis-judge the properties of the ball in space the first few times. But I'd be willing to bet money they'd be able to adjust very quickly--say less than a day (rather than 15)--because they have a more complicated internal model of the trajectories of thrown things, with more parameters to tune and less hard-coded stuff to unlearn.
-Trey
So what we're saying is that we are working under a gravity 2.0 model currently. Maybe these guys are working under gravity XP. Gravity 2.0 likely added a lot of unnecessary bloat to the problem that XP removed, hence no gravity.
Err -- maybe. Or it could be that I'm just bored today.
when you do something long enough (like live on earth for ~40 years) you learn how your environment operates. internal model nothing.
A Bowwoofwoof cluster of them! :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So, how would you juggle in a zero-gravity environment?? Has anybody tried it? Or is the very concept void and null?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Maybe they mutated after those 15 days!
Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness. And of course, this could have literally millions of applications here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Average people are not interested in space research. As far as most Americans are concerned, the goal of space exploration has been achieved. "The Good Capitalists beat the Bad Communists. God showed whose side He was on. Time to stop spending all those billions on NASA." That is how an average person thinks. Space research such as this, even though it tells us lots about ourselves, is as interesting to Joe Sixpack as watchmaking and watch repair.
I recommend they follow the lead of these firemen. Nothing like fear of negative reinforcement to improve performance.
Is there any articles / pics / vids of sex in space? :D
:D
Out of scientific curiosity ofcourse
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
My thought is that there must be an amazingly powerful adaptive learning mechanism built into the brain if it can reprogram itself to compensate for zero G (no, I won't say "microgravity". Nor "Shuttle" without an article, nor "liftoff" instead of "blastoff". Take that NASA!) trajectories in 15 days. I started playing catch with my boys when they were 8 months old or so - something burned in that deep and the brain can still adapt. Amazing.
sPh
astronauts continue to anticipate the path of a ball for 15 days
Wow, those astronauts sure have strong throwing arms.
I juggle.
;)
Actually, a whole lot of juggling is putting your hand in the right place at the right time. You're not really watching all the balls in the air, if you're doing more than 3. If anything, a juggler relies on the anticipation *more* to catch a ball than say, a baseball outfielder, who can just follow the single ball in with his vision.
That being said, and getting back to the humor, yeah, I bet I could catch the ball better than those physics guys any day.
Simple experiments here on earth prove the exact opposite conclusion, that we depend on the external forces acting on us even during mental imagery. Have someone lie sideways or upside down and their imagery and performance is affected in ways directly linked to the orientation of external gravity. If we had and used an internal gravity model then we could ignore the cues from external gravity and still perform equally well.
Crikey! I'd hate to see the complicated problems you do when you *are* paying attention. =)
Where they discovered beer is full of estrogen - because after 10 pints you talk crap and can't drive.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
and it was obvious that he picked up standing while holding onto something (i.e. the muscle coordination involved) before he picked up "standing while counterbalancing gravity. He would stand next to his toybox while comptemplating which toy to grab... then he'd let go off the toybox to grab a toy and fall down. You could see that he had *no idea* of why he fell down initially.
So yes... I find it quite believable that gravity is modeled in the brain separately from kinematics and that therefore new kinematic skills (like learning to catch in 0-g) have a hard time disengaging the gravity model.
--Rob
You nailed that one pretty clever, eh pad're --- Penrose too, craps all over that "internal *...ional model" and for good reason.
I can only imagine how great my drive would become with minimal gravity. Although I don't think that would help my short game. DOH!
Who is John Galt?
I saw a documentary where there was a rat (I think, or another small furry ball of some sort) that was given a small piece of food. This piece of food was dropped in a hole in front of the animal's eyes and was exiting on the bottom. There was several holes on the top of the box and another row of holes in the bottom.
The experiment was to drop the piece and see where the animal would expect it to fall. Well, it seems that the animal always expected it to fall from the hole directly under the one it was dropped into, and when it wasn't the case the animal was confused.
So they found that this animal was expecting the piece of food to follow the law of gravity.
Try it! Library of Babel
Arriving back at the Cape, he was standing in the hallway, drinking coffee, and talking to one of the other astronauts. In mid-sentence, he put his coffee cup out in the middle of air and let go.
As he cleaned up the mess on the floor, he mentioned that he still wasn't used to gravity.
I don't know if this story is true, but I love it.
Armageddon was the worst movie I've ever seen, period. This reminded me of one of my favorite things about this movie.
"You won't have to worry about gravity. Your space suits have little bitty rocket motors on them that will simulate gravity, pushing you down to the asteroid surface as though it had normal earth gravity.".
Yeah, sure. Notice that they had nice, healthy gravity when they were in their little spaceships, too, even while parked on the asteroid surface. There's one point where one character tosses a tool to another character. Notice the nice, clean little arc the tool takes. Please.
Just one of a thousand or so things about this movie that made me want to strangle the people who made it. :-)
Nope, no sig
Why limit ourselves to merly "-1"?
That "Physics Genius" deserves something like "-3 Moronic", I'd also like to take the opportunity to request a "-5 Goat Sex Link".
In college, my anthropology prof talked about this. He speculated that we as humans could predict trajectories very accurately as a result of having to be able to throw spears accurately. The more accurately you could predict the trajectory, the more likely you would live to pass on that trait.
by laying on your back and throwing a ball straight up. Once you get the hang of throwing it straight up, which is a challenge in its own right, you will be catching the ball with the same trajectory as the astronauts. It's difficult to throw it straight up for the same reason it's difficult to catch in space: your brain ends up compensating for gravity, so your first several (or several dozen) will probably go back over you head. I discovered this exercise when I was about 10; I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to catch at first.
I propose that future astronauts perform this exercise for 15 days before their flight. That way, they will be able to play catch right away, with no "warmup period," thus making them more productive. And to think my Mom said I was wasting time!
Evil is the money of root.
... that simple ballistics is one of the few instincts we humans are born with (such as holding our breath when under water), an innate ability to judge an object's motion in free-fall. Something that came in handy when we were jumping from branch to branch or throwing stuff at predators. Something akin to the way cats can always land on their feet.
Of course, I'm not a biologist so I could be wrong...
It's a somewhat old scifi/mystery short story by Isaac Asimov, the resolution of which, had to do something with how the human body adapts to changes in environment (spec. gravity).
In one of his anthologies, Asimov wonders whether his premise was correct...this study apparently validates his premise.
there's a certain amount of linear modeling the brain can do. Note that, for a small enough interval, a linear model can be made "good enough".
The interesting examples:
1. Move a beehive by a fixed amount each day while they're out gathering. The bees adjust to this (e.g., 10feet/day), and head to where they know it *will be*. Increase this amount by a fixed amount (10, 11, 12, etc.) and they can't do it.
2. Parachute landing. Don't look at the ground. You're falling at a rate the brain can't handle; if you watch, you compensate incorrectly, and often hurt yourself. (so hear the brain seems to expect the gravity induced quadratic, whereas you're moving at a linear rate?).
hawk
If a person were suspended from their feet upside down, the ball would drift upwards, from their perspective, due to gravity.
Seeing how long that it takes to adapt to this change may lead to some intresting conclusions.
I'm sure this has been mentioned before... but what about throwing a frisbee? A good frisbee will travel exactly horizontally from source to target and us humans have no problem catching it.
I'm trying to imagine what I would do in space. I can see myself trying to anticipate the not dropping ball and messing up. I can also see myself catching a frisbee with few problems in space. Maybe our brains have learnt from experience that balls tend to drop and frisbees don't as much
Surely we must do something similar to this for different shaped balls that fall in different ways. An (American) football travels in a different way to a (real ie: soccer) football because of their shape.
Sounds like a load of balls to me.
Its a hard thing for anyone to gauge the absence of gravity considering how little we leave it during our lives.
Ivan
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
... in one of the "future history" series. I forget which one -- but it was one of the lunar stories. The Rolling Stones? The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? The Menace from Earth? I remember one of his Knockout-Nobel-Laureate-Who-Just-Wants-To-Make-Bab ies women talking about it...
anyone who calls themselves "Genius" typically falls into one of two categories:
1) primadonna
2) not a genius
most fall into the second category and nobody likes either category. And excellent choice of usernames for such an obvious narcissist
NASA's recent failure to convert between metric and Imperial units
Toki Pona speakers had it right all along: the word 'nasa' means crazy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model." -- You live all of your life under the earth's gravity, so your brain is used to how things react in that system.
Speaking as a neuroscience grad, I'm going to say this once: The second sentence above says the same thing as the first. "Internal model" is a fancy way of saying that the brain will predict the behavior of something. No more, no less.
In other words, your brain doesn't see a ball coming at you and do this:
Ball approaching at 40 mph and presently 12 ft altitude.
Based on calculations of gravity and wind resistance, ball will arrive at 35 mph and 4 ft altitude
Move hand to location
Calculations dont have to be in base 10, or involve digits at all, in order to be calculations. Analog computers are still computers.
It's more like this: Ball approaching. Based on the millions of times I've experienced this, the ball will arrive at about right here (hand goes into place)
There's a big "at this point, a miracle happens" moment in that sentence. Unless you claim that you can only catch balls that travel in exactly the same trajectory as balls you'e seen before, you're going to need to generalize their behavior a bit. Once you generalize the behavior, you've got an internal model.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Bark bark bark shit bark bark. The previous poster.
Hmm... NASA sends people into space and asks them to to catch balls.
So I'm assuming it was a mission specialists doing these experiments (read engineer). So the suprising point of this multi-million dollar experiment is that engineers can't play catch.
I'm stupified.
His solution: he pulls out a cricket ball, throws it at the spaceship, and catches it on the rebound. Voila...thrust. He drifts on to the TARDIS, and all is good.
Hey, it's really not off-topic if you think about it.
That's a better anoalogy, the baseball outfielder. He catches balls from a great variety of distance, angle, and speed. He reacts to the ball.
- Dan I.
. . . had been sitting under an apple tree in space instead of on earth, the trajectory of the apple that hit him on the head would have been soooo much more easily calculated?
Their they're doing there hair.
I'm posting this a bit late, but I noticed that no one here (with a rating of at least 3 anyway) noticed how ridiculous this story is. The claim is that the brain expects the ball to have a parapolic trajectory due to gravity, and so it is dificult to catch because it goes straight at constant speed...
Hm. A rolling soccer ball and, better yet, a hockey puck have pretty much a constant speed (minus friction) and in the simplest case don't have a parabolic trajectory: they move the very same way a ball in space does. Yet it doesn't take 15 days for any of us to figure out how to stop them.