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Speed of Sound Is Too Slow For the Olympics
Hugh Pickens "For decades sports-event organizers have placed speakers behind athletes to convey the sound of an actual pistol but they found that even though the noise came through the speakers all at once, athletes continued to wait for the 'real' sound, ignoring the sounds that came through the speakers ever-so-slightly slowing down the farthest athlete from the gun. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that when the Olympic runners take to their positions on the track later this week, they'll crouch on the ground, ears pricked, and wait for the starting beep played by a 'pistol' that's not a pistol at all, but something more akin to an electronic instrument with only one key. The pistol itself is silent."
Read on for a bit more about the difficulties of timing people with superhuman reaction times.
"A conversation with sprinter Michael Johnson at the Sydney Olympics caused Peter Hürzeler of OMEGA Timing to realize that even with speakers, the speed of sound was still slowing down the farthest athletes. Johnson's reaction time, Hurzeler said, 'was 440 thousandths of a second. Normally athletes leave between 130 and 140 thousandths of a second. ... I asked him, why did you have such a bad starting time?' Turned out, Johnson was in the ninth position, and the sound of the gun was reaching him too slowly.
"In addition after a four year developmental process, a new false start detection system is being introduced this year that will abandon movement in exchange for 'measurement' of pound-force against the back block to determine sprinters reaction times. 'We are measuring the time between the starting gun and when the athlete is moving because to leave the starting block they had to push against and this power is very high' says Hurzeler. 'We did a test last year with Asafa Powell and he was pushing 240 kilograms (529 lbs.) [so] as soon as he gives the time to push against the starting block, it means he will like to leave and we are measuring this in thousandths of seconds and if somebody is leaving before one hundredth thousandth of second, it's automatically a recall, it's a false start.' In track every event is timed to 1/10,000th of a second, and Omega takes 2,000 pictures per second from right before the start of a race to its finish, as backup.
"New touch pads, starting blocks, and timers have also been introduced for swimming."
"In addition after a four year developmental process, a new false start detection system is being introduced this year that will abandon movement in exchange for 'measurement' of pound-force against the back block to determine sprinters reaction times. 'We are measuring the time between the starting gun and when the athlete is moving because to leave the starting block they had to push against and this power is very high' says Hurzeler. 'We did a test last year with Asafa Powell and he was pushing 240 kilograms (529 lbs.) [so] as soon as he gives the time to push against the starting block, it means he will like to leave and we are measuring this in thousandths of seconds and if somebody is leaving before one hundredth thousandth of second, it's automatically a recall, it's a false start.' In track every event is timed to 1/10,000th of a second, and Omega takes 2,000 pictures per second from right before the start of a race to its finish, as backup.
"New touch pads, starting blocks, and timers have also been introduced for swimming."
Not sure if real pistol fired next to the athletes is too easy or not geek enough...
They should just use a light instead of sound. Even at school we waved a flag to start because if we went by sound it would introduce an error into the timing.
Why not use lights? Some LEDs embedded into the track or something would work just as well, no?
Appropriate, for once...
Speed of sound is 330 m/s. That's a kilometer in a third of a second.
That's a kilometer in three seconds.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Actually, it's one kilometer in 3 seconds, not 1/3.
Speed of sound is 330m/s yes, but thats a kilometer in ~3 seconds. You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you. In a third of a second, you are looking at 110meters, so a third of a second delay in starting is still higher than I would have expected.
Why not just lights? Works for F1.
When acting as a timing judge for swim team events, we have always been told to watch for the strobe flash from the start signal. It is supposed to be much more consistent.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Huh? 100m in a third of a second is a kilometer?
I think the calculation you were looking for is:
8 lanes * 4 feet = 32 feet or 10 meters
10/330 = 0.03 seconds
so yes 0.03 sec is not very much and certainly not 0.3 second
Highest bidder gets to hear the starting gun first
As others pointed out, it's 3 seconds per km, or rather about 300 ms per 100m. This is a bit more plausible, though I doubt position 9 is 100 m away. And if this was indeed the case you'd see a gradually decreasing reaction time as you get further away from the source.
...had it right? Would this also fall under space-time maybe?
Why not just move the starting gun to behind the athletes? The further back it is placed, the more equal the distance to each athlete. It doesn't get as much media attention though.
gun set up directly behind each athlete and program it to shoot them all at once
Shooting the athletes seems fun at first, but the event is going to be over quick and what are you going to do then?
This reminds me of my time in the navy. There was a minimum requirement for everything, including 60 meter sprint. I ran it once, and got clocked in 1/10th of a second to late. Fearing I would have to run 60 meters once more, I protested because the starter gun was at the finish line! The sound would take almost exactly 1/10th of a second to reach the starting line from the finish line, I argued. They had to accept the protest, of course, and I made the requirement exactly.
...so why not give runners a time bonus if they are in a later lane ? Start 30 m from the gun, get a 100ms bonus. Sounds simple enough, no ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
How about placing runners in some kind of human-sized hamster wheels with clutch mechanisms, so that all runners can already be running at top speed for some short period prior to the actual start of the race, at which time all of the clutches are simultaneously disengaged, so all runners start at full their full stride and their full speed at the same time? This would change the dynamics of racing because it would remove reaction time as a competitive element from the race. But what is a race? Is it to see who has the fastest reaction time, or who runs the fastest, or both?
The Admin and the Engineer
As others already pointed out, you're not exactly a math genious.
Also, the article mentions they take a shitload of images and detemine the winner
this way (-> http://goo.gl/vKZFa - chest is, what counts).
Furthermore the speed of sound could easily explain a difference of let's say 0.02s (equivalent to ~ 6.5m)
and as you said yourself, sometimes that does make the difference.
There are 8 lanes on a track, each of which are 1.27 meters wide. There are 7 lane widths between a head in lane 1 and a head in lane 8. This works out to 8.89 meters. The speed of sound is 340.29 meter/sec. The leads to a worst case difference of .026 seconds between lane 1 and lane 8. The difference between bronze and gold in the 2008 Olympics Men's 100 Meters is 0.22 seconds. So at first it seems to not be an issue, but the difference between bronze and 4th place was .02 seconds. This indicates that lane position and the speed of sound could have an effect on the outcome of an event.
It's more like 10 meters. Which means the difference in time is 0.03s, which is (at the 100m sprint) significant, and can mean the difference between winning or losing, or between a world record or no record.
So. Rather than have the pistol in line with the row at one side, how about having it in the middle halving the dis-advantage at the extreme(s). Even better, have the pistol central but step back 10 - 20 foot or so and that reduces the differential even further. Seems more practical and a lot more inexpensive than a super dooper electronic system.
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
Of course we do. There are 1.6 kilometres to the gallon, and 3 litres to the American non-statutory country mile (the liquid mile, that is; a dry mile is 3 9/8 bushels longer, except in Kansas where it's *another* 7 degrees higher and isn't allowed to be measured at all on a Sunday).
What confuses me is that the story says they're using speakers, meaning every player hears the sound at the same time. So where's the issue?
It seems that the speakers convey the sound of a guy with an actual gun further behind. But why aren't the players training themselves to react to the first sound, disregarding the real noise. More importantly, why the hell is there even a real gun out there if they've got the speakers? They couldn't have started using a prerecorded sound years ago?
It appears to me that the real story here is that these officials are so slavish to hopelessly outdated traditions that they'll continue sticking to them even long after it's become evident that it's detrimental. It reminds me of FIFA's long time refusal to accept replays or goal line technology.
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
His problem was not in misunderstanding the metric system, his problem was in failing to do simple algebra.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
If the speed of sound would be a potential factor in determining who wins, it counts as a tie.
I have a feeling we'd see a lot of deaf people at least tying for first in the Olympics then.
I find it funny that the US gets criticized for not being metric, when the UK isn't either. Officially sure, but they all talk in pounds and stone and ounces.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
In F1 the drivers are looking down the track, not at the floor.
Plus sound works better as a starting stimulus (as somebody pointed out above).
No sig today...
Not at all!
Having them wounded and limping to the finish will make the race take significantly longer!
More time for the main event, advertising. It does make perfect sense, it may just be ahead of the time.
If you jump the gun you get disqualified.
Great, now that the "real" athletes are also complaining about ping times, can we make FPS olympic?
It isn't just the width of the lanes, of course. For some races, the sprinters are started with a considerable offset from one another along the track to account for inside-outside lane length differences.
What a non-story. It says in the article that they began using this technology in the 2010 Vancouver Games.
" Beginning at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, OMEGA switched to the current "silent" pistol technology, erasing the thousandths of of a second that stood between runner nine and runner one."
... 0.03 sec is not very much ...
0.03 sec is enormous in the context of the Olympics. The difference between Gold and Silver medals is sometimes 0.01 sec.
Give him a break. He's a Political Science graduate.
The UK system is easy to remember.
Beer is in Pints. Except when it is Foreign. Then it should be in pints, but them damn foreigners don't know what they are doing.
Milk is in pints.
All other liquids are in metric.
People are measured in imperial. Except newborns who are metric.
All food, except steaks are metric.
Distances when using a road are imperial. All other times metric.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
"Instead of raising your hand to ask a question in class, how about individual push buttons on each desk. That way, when you want to ask a question, you just push the button and it lights up a corresponding number on a tote board at the front of the class. Then all the professor has to do is check the lighted number against a master sheet of names and numbers to see who is asking the question."
Simple!
That pretty much sums it up.
Other distances are imperial e.g. we still have furlongs in horse racing, and horses are still in hands.
Fuel economy is still typically talked of in miles per gallon.
Cold temperatures are in Celsius, hot in Farenheit.
Clothes are still normally measured in inches.
jh
I find it funny that the US gets criticized for not being metric, when the UK isn't either. Officially sure, but they all talk in pounds and stone and ounces.
All actual work is done in metric.
The imperial holdovers are in a few bits of daily life: road speeds and distances (but the roads and cars are built using metric measurements), human height and weight (but doctors always use metric), beer volume in pubs.
(Other daily life things are metric: temperature, buying and cooking food, building construction etc.)
It's stupid, and I wish we'd just finish the transition, but it's nowhere near as annoying as the US.
I check and review a lot of engineering papers, I see about 3x the rate of order of magnitude type errors like this one with metric units compared to conventional units. Even from "native metric users".
Speaking of calling bullshit on something, the premise of this article is utter BS as well. The difference in time of arrival of the sound based on lane position is on the order of 30 msec, worst-case, not 300-ish.
Time differences of 0.03 seconds, when measuring human activities, is an almost random amount.
Let's just say all of the athletes are special and give everyone a participation trophy.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure. Not millionths of the distance from Paris to the north pole or wavelengths of cesium or WTF arbitrary measurement a metre is. Use feet. Yes, it would be dumb to use human feet to measure an interplanetary space probe, but this is totally appropriate.
Sound travels at 5 secs/mile as anybody who's survived a thunderstorm and counted miles away by fives knows. In other words one second = 1000 feet or sound takes about "a thousandth" to go a foot. The article is babbling about measuring run times to ten thousandths of a second, and sounds takes one thousandth to go a foot, so it doesn't take a genius engineer or physicist to figure if you want tenths accuracy you need to position the speakers the same distance from the ears with tenth of a foot accuracy, or "about an inch". Which the olympic fools still aren't doing correctly, as near as I can tell.
Its all idiocy for show anyway. They have to start at the same instant because in ye olden days they didn't have computer measurements, so they determined the winner by who passed the line first. They should just run individually now and use chrono gates much like at a gun range. Yes yes, I know its motivational to run together and "compete" while running but these are adults not five year olds, so they can be expected to run "really fast all the time" even if not in a pack or herd. I'm sure the steroids will ensure a proper competitive attitude and outlook on life.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
... is a 12-step program for these folks, (all puns intended).
All serious work is done in metric in the US. Imperial is used in everyday life stuff by the people, same as the UK.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Then how about putting the guy with the starting pistol in the middle of the group? you know it's a lot easier to have that guy walk a little bit closer to the middle of the starting pack.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Shoot spectators? There are loads of them, so if you lock them all in you could probably draw it out for the duration of the event...
Note for British police, politicians, and other idiots: The above is a (weak) joke, and I am not seriously advocating shooting olympic attendees. Removing the lead before making them into soylent green adds too much to the processing costs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
make the track shorter and put a single first aid or trauma kit at the finish line...
Second part of the race is who can stop bleeding the fastest....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And, to add even more confusion, those are IMPERIAL gallons, which are quiet a bit off (15% or so) of US gallons.
TODO: Something witty here...
The fuel economy one is particularly problematic for UK vs US measurement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon#Comparison_of_historic_gallons
US uses the 1/128th of an oz - similar to other imperial measurements where it is powers of two for easy division.
(16 tablespoons in a cup, 4 cups in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon).
The brits use 1/160th of an oz for some odd historical reason.
So, when I told someone my car was averaging 38mpg between fillups, he thought it was pretty bad, since for him that would be equiv to 31.6mpg in the US.
When I read a car report from Britain and I read that the car is getting 45mpg, I get excited at first, before I realise that's about what my car gets.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure.
Can we use my feet? They're about 27cm long.
(In case you hadn't noticed, the race is measured in metres, and almost all the athletes measure all distances in metres.)
Yep, and it means when UK people hear about US gas guzzlers, it sounds far worse than it is (although it's often not that great to start with). Read a car report that lists 62.8mpg instead (there's plenty out there for tax band reasons, even a BMW 520d gets that), and that way it's pretty good whichever way you cut it.
jh
Entirely true, when we use Imperial, we use Imperial :)
jh
Uh.. wait... how wide is a Kansas Sunday again?
Log in or piss off.
About one week
Uh.. wait... how wide is a Kansas Sunday again?
It depends on how many miles you have to go to get to a state line so that you can buy beer on said Sunday.
Maybe better, but still not good enough. Think about the staggered starts for longer races, and the fact that some of these events are won/lost in times of under .02 seconds. Maybe they could use some kind of light at the front of each starting position.
Just another day in Paradise
Right?
..don't panic
"[Each] day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. [...] Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t."
"Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent."
From the NYT Jul 28
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html?&pagewanted=all
For the 200m and 400m, they have staggered starts along the curve so the distance between sprinters is much greater.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
There was an article on /. where it was argued that journalists should use more jargon if it helped convey the message. After reading "thousandth of a second" *four* times in the summary, yes, please, just say millisecond!!
If you think algebra was required for that math, then you already failed.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
I find it interesting that you assume the OP is American. From the UK link in the profile, I would have assumed otherwise.
I think it comes down to its more interesting to watch a race rather then time trials. Also the crowd cheering for someone crossing the finishing line first, but really they came in fourth would just be silly.
Perhaps they should put the superior ranking athletes the furthest away from the gun since they could make up for the fractions of a second delay through superior skill. That would at least give the slow white dudes a chance.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
0.44s - 0.135s = 0.305s. Speed of sound is 343m/s. Are we supposed to believe that the farthest starting position is about 343m/s * 0.305s = 104m further away from the pistol than the nearest? The guy's just slow.
I'm guessing you've never been to a track meet ...
In events like the 400m (one complete circuit of a standard track oval), people run in their lane the entire distance around the track. Because the outside lanes are longer than the inside lanes and the finish line is directly across the track, the starting positions are staggered to make the distance ran equal. Yes, that is a significant distance between the fellow in the outside lane (close to the starter pistol) and the fellow in the inside lane (far from the starter pistol), possibly quite close to the 100m you computed.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Ugh. I mean. Oz is 1/128th of a gallon or 128 oz in a gallon
Other way around from how I said it.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Stick an electrode up their arse. When it is time to go, zap them. About 50,000 volts will do nicely.
All joking aside, they really could just use lights. Or is the speed of light too slow as well?
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Just attach a "certificate" to those pieces of metal saying something like:
"This piece of metal is unique representation of ___________ nation's glory and superiority over other nations.
Priceless though it may be, we have spent ________________$ to acquire it. It is very valuable. Really."
There. Now it's worth as much as the highest bidder would like to pay for it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How about using a light signal instead? Turn a light green for go.
Currently hooked on AMP
Pretty sure newborns are still measured in imperial. It's so you can judge how close the newborn was to your preferred weight of bowling ball.
Its a long way off. I came to the US from the UK at age 10, and had no idea what feet and inches were - yet found that when you mentioned something basic "77 cm" to someone over hear they had absolutely no idea how long that was without doing mental gymnastics. That's still true today BTW, 30 years later. People in the US outside of a few very specialized fields just don't think in metric units.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
About 2 Libraries of Congress.
a dry mile is 3 9/8 bushels longer, except in Kansas where it's *another* 7 degrees higher and isn't allowed to be measured at all on a Sunday.
It is actually dependent on which county you're in. Dry counties are actually 7 3/4 degrees higher with further restrictions on measurement after 10:00 pm the rest of the week.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
When I ran track in the 70s, we were taught to watch for smoke from the starter's pistol rather than wait for the soundwave. So much for technology.
I'll take a British pint over an American one anyday :-)
All I care is do they knock down all the pins when I throw them down the lane.
Like this?
Have gnu, will travel.
Some races are decided by margins on the order of 10 msec. So 30 msec does matter.
The solution has already been in use for a long time - in dog and horse races. Put the competitors behind bars, and let them out at the same time. That way there's no time difference, and no false starts.
Or do it the way it's done in alpine sports - let the participant choose when to start within a short interval, and measure when he actually breaks the starting line. That way there would be new tactics at play too.
Precisely one week and 13 cubits... in other words, 2 parsecs, 14 hours and 23 cents.
Not when you're operating at the level that these athletes oftentimes are. The tires on my car being a fraction of a degree out of alignment doesn't matter too much, generally speaking, but if you had the tires on a vehicle attempting to set the land speed record out of alignment by that same fraction of a degree, I shudder to think what might happen. When you push things to their limits, the tolerances become much smaller, and as you understand things more and can account for all of the variables better, the variation tends to get reduced. These athletes have been training for years, had thousands of doctors, scientists, and trainers working with them, and have trained in order to eliminate the elements that you would dismiss as random.
Which isn't to say that you're entirely incorrect, just that I think you're being far too dismissive.
Bizarrely, even when I was a kid, all the textbooks had everything measured in metric, but even at that young age, U.S. kids already seem to know imperial units and find the metric stuff to be something that has to be converted. If it is not taught along with learning to talk, then it is too late.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
if you want tenths accuracy you need to position the speakers the same distance from the ears with tenth of a foot accuracy, or "about an inch".
Ok, we have one runner who is 5'11", and next to him is a runner that is 6'3". Where to place the the speaker? All at the same distance from the blocks? We have a disparity in ear distance.
Adjust for each runner? There will be claims of 'it was placed wrong'.
Or do it the way it's done in alpine sports - let the participant choose when to start within a short interval, and measure when he actually breaks the starting line. That way there would be new tactics at play too.
How do you do that when there are multiple people in the race?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the problem isn't that the sound takes longer to reach the farthest lane, but that the sound it self changes so it takes longer for the athletes brain to recognize; perhaps the slope of the waveforms attack front is degrades multi-path distortion just pops in my head.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Use a light, then, for Pete's sake. Why make this difficult?
I don't buy this truck of measuring the time to ten thousandths of a second anyway. 1/10,000 of a second, we are talking about 1/100th of an inch at top speed for a runner. I don't believe they have that kind of accuracy in their measurement.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Shoes are measured in barleycorns most of the time.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Which feet do you use, though? Greek feet (between 270 mm and 350 mm), because this is the Olympics; International feet (304.8mm), because this is an international event; or American feet (304.8006096mm), because they're the ones complaining? That's the problem with customary units, they're different in different places, sometimes even in the next county over.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I would have thought that world record times would fall if there was a standard time from "get set" to bang. It seemed like there might have been such a thing in the swimming, the time periods seemed so uniform. Presumably the Olympics could simply send out a CD recording of the message that will be played at the start of a race from speakers behind each athlete, that way false starts would be reduced, the reaction time issue would be replaced by a requirement to be able to judge the delay accurately. It may not be "the sport" but if it causes records to fall it would be welcomed by the event's promoters. I wonder if there is anything in the rules about it.
Nullius in verba
I'm from Australia, lived in the UK for many years and now live in the US. When I first went to the UK I could not understand anything, as I had no experience dealing with pounds or ounces. Feet are easy enough to pick up...but the UK is far from metric. If it were, I would not have had so much trouble being from a metric country.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Even so, the 0.03 second difference is tiny compared to the actual time difference observed, and makes Johnson's complaint irrelevant. His reaction time 'was 440 thousandths of a second. Normally athletes leave between 130 and 140 thousandths of a second'. So basically he left 3/10 of a second later than normally expected, whereas the difference in hearing sounds based on starting position could only make a difference of 3/100 of a second - so what about the rest of the delay, how is that explainable? The speed of sound isn't the only reason he left ~300 thousands of a second later than the competitors
Also, this is assuming that the sound is only emanating from a source directly perpendicular to where the athletes face. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the guy with the pistol used to stand directly behind the competitors? That means the athletes heard the sound at the same time. If that's based on a "beep" now instead, isn't the easy / correct solution just to place the speaker directly behind the competitors? This sounds like an overly complex solution to a simple problem
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
How do you do that when there are multiple people in the race?
One gate per participant. That's simple enough with lasers.
0.03 sec is enormous in the context of the Olympics. The difference between Gold and Silver medals is sometimes 0.01 sec. .03 off, that doesn't mean that the Gold winner would now be .04 seconds ahead (or .02 behind). The runners run based in part on what their opponents are doing, and the last bit is likely to be just as close if they all started at the same time or if one started 1/4 second late.
But the end of the race doesn't correlate that closely to the beginning of the race. If the timing was
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
There are loudspeaker horns behind every starting place. Every racer is the same distance from his horn. If they are too stupid to listen to the amplified version, and wait for the real shot to reach them, then they deserve to lose.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
One gate per participant. That's simple enough with lasers.
But if the clock starts differently for each of them, then how do they know if they are behind and need to press faster? They aren't racing the clock, they are racing each other.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
We already see this in distance events with chipped timing. Guy in front thinks he's won, but doesn't realize there's another guy who crossed the start 10 seconds after him who is actually beating him. I like the idea of a speaker in each starting block. Simple, and nobody gets an advantage.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
But if the clock starts differently for each of them, then how do they know if they are behind and need to press faster? They aren't racing the clock, they are racing each other.
Did you miss my "That way, there will be tactics at play too"?
Nope, you quoted it.
There will likely be an incentive to start just after the others. It's not too different from tempo biking in that everyone waits for someone else to make a run, and then follows, except that the clocks will start anyhow if everybody delays, so athletes will have to start running quickly.
The main difference is that the timing will be precise for each runner, and not based on when a signal was given, but the actual running time.
It seems rather a lot of people quoted that one sentence but it upset you the most so I'll apologise here. It was a light hearted rhetorical question (head full of paint thinner meant my grammar was missing in places in that post so do please excuse the missing question mark) and a bit of casual national stereotyping isn't something I'd wish to offend people with. I know most people here can easily take that joke on the chin, but it seems you can't, and I am sorry for that. I am indeed Eurotrash too!
Are you on a council to figure out how to make the Olympics more boring?
LOL apparently I'm an amateur compared to the current council members.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Riiiiight. That's why lumber still comes in 4'x8' sheets and 2x4s... Oh, my bad, that's 3'7"x7'3" and 1 1/2"x3 1/2" :(
I'm from Canada and unfortunately, we deal with the same BS up here.
So, we shower someone who is .1% faster (.01 sec / 10 sec) with gold, and the "loser" gets virtually nothing, eh?
Yeah, sounds like today's world: concentrate the reward to the top .1% of people and screw all the rest.
--PM
Is it? A couple weeks back I read an RAIB incident report (in a discussion of why trains take so long to stop, a mention was made of a train that overran its intended stopping point by two and a half miles, and I was curious about the details), and I noted that they used the following units:
Track positions were measured in miles/chains, long distances were measured in decimal miles, and short distances were measured in meters.
Speeds were measured in miles per hour.
Flow rates were measured in kilograms per minute.
Accelerations were measured in %g.
Short times were measured in seconds, while long times were measured in fractional hours.
Pressures were measured in bar.
Actual work is done in metric, you say?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I've read a few of those reports.
All dimensions and speeds in this report are given in metric units, except speed and locations on Network Rail managed infrastructure, which are given in imperiay dimensions, in accordance with Network Rail practice. In this case the equivalent metric value is also given.
Distances are still in miles/chains, from when most railways were built. I'm not sure why they don't convert them -- there was a "near miss" on the railway near my house, as the night shift engineering team looked at the overhead electricity gantries (which had plates giving the distance in km from the start of the line) instead of the mileposts (which have the distance in miles) to see where they were supposed to be working. I'm very near the end of the line, so the misunderstanding wasn't unreasonable on their part. I assume the cost of converting 16000km of railway signposts isn't seen as worthwhile -- if you read a report on a "new" (or somehow redone) railway it's 100% metric.
NB kg/minute, seconds, hours, bar are all metric (though not SI).
Hmm. My 120D is rated at 57 and I struggle to get it above 40. Admittedly I'm not driving it in the most economical manner..
Yeah, well, my car was averaging 38 (gasoline), not max. On highway, I could do a bit better. 40. And that was despite driving 75+mph
I checked out
http://www.fuelly.com/car/bmw/520d/2012
and it looks like the 520d owners aren't doing much better.
But they might drive a bit more aggressively than I do.
(all measurements above in US gallons)
Anyway, 52mpg is indeed pretty damn good. Looks like it has regenerative breaking which helps on that front a lot.
Diesel though. In the US diesel is more expensive than gasoline.
http://thegreencarco.com/blog/news/diesel-more-expensive-gasoline/
Popularity of gasoline probably also explains why it is abbreviated in the US and not so much in europe.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Which limb?
Or, more precisely :
Which limb, first?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
... a nice synchronous kick in the but by 8 referees would be THE optimal solution ... why no one thought about that before?
People are measured in imperial. Except newborns who are metric.
No new parent I know tells anyone what their baby weighs in metric. It's well understood that if your baby weighs more than 10 pounds at birth, you'll never be able to sit down without a rubber ring again.
Now I don't know many new parents, but the ones I do know used metric. As did I when my daughter was born.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Most HVAC design is Imperial:
BTUs* for heat
Degrees Fahrenheit wet bulb and dry bulb for temperature
Grains per pound for relative humidity
Chances are your thermal comfort in the USA can be attributed to Imperial-unit-based "real work".
One of the first equations recent graduates learn in their practical education is:
Q=1.08*CFM*(T-T_0)
That 1.08 has units of (BTU * minutes) / (feet^3 * hours * degrees Rankine)
ASHRAE publications (engineers' bibles for heating and refrigeration design) have both IP and SI editions, but the current standard for equipment specification and engineered design is Imperial.
*or even Tons (the energy required to melt one short ton of ice in 24 hours) as a rate of cooling. One ton is defined as 12,000 BTU/hour, but in reality about 11500 BTU/hour would melt a short ton of ice in 24 hours.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Milk is in pints.
Milk is in pints if you buy it from the milkman or buy own-brand milk from a store run by a big supermarket chain (even if the store in question isn't actually a big supermarket). If you buy it from a conviniance store that isn't associated with a big supermarket it generally comes in litres. Branded milk (like the cravendale filtered stuff) also tends to come in litres.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Cartons come in liters, bottles (plastic or glass) generally come in pints, even from a small convenience store (where I live anyway).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.