“sports”
7 posts under this tag.
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
Been going to spinning daily for several weeks now (and when I say daily, it’s daily daily, not improv’d daily daily). Lately, however, I’ve gone back to hacker sleep and it has noticeably affected my stamina—meaning I get exhausted just mounting the bike and that it’s only minutes before I start mumbling silent insults to that pregnant teacher/bitch who just bosses you around without tasting her own medicine. The interesting thing is that just near the end of the class, when I’m close to fainting and have to cheat and lower the resistance (and when I’m just about to punch that preggo), we relax for a while and I drink some water, some plain old water. And… it takes better than it has ever, ever, tasted before. It lingers in my mouth for a while, because my breath is too fast and I’m choking, and—at least for the first sips—it has texture, I swear it! It’s probably only my congealed saliva mixing with the fresh water (yummy!) but I have sometimes felt—clearly, intensely—as if I was chewing a rare, delicious steak (a Cambalache one!). Oh, the mirage! It’s probably just my subconscious rebelling against my last months of vegetarianism but, boy, if you could only taste it.
This time a fascinating little gem from the cover article, The Expert Mind, of this month’s Scientific American: The month you were born plays decisive importance into whether you’ll become a professional soccer player or not. That’s a fact.
A 1999 study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent. In Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia, the players were much more likely than average to have been born in the first quarter (Q1) after the cutoff date for youth soccer leagues.. Because these players were older than their teammates when they joined the leagues, they would have enjoyed advantages in size and strength, allowing them to handle the ball and score more often. Their success in early years would have motivated them to keep improving, thus explaining their disproportionate representation in the professional leagues.
NOTE: The cutoff dates were August 1 for Germany, Brazil and Australia, and April 1 for Japan.
I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s wonderful, mocking account of how he became a scientist (which appears in John Brockman’s Curious Minds, a book I’ve praised lavishly already).
Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist. Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either. One of the curses of being an experimental psychologist is the habit of scrutinizing one’s own mental processes. Recounting childhood influences is a mental process no less subject to quirks and errors than falling for the visual illusions on the back of a cereal box. Everything I know about the recollection of childhood influences makes me approach this assignment with misgivings..
In a classic 1977 review, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson argued that many of the causes of our choices never enter our consciousness. Here is a simple example. If you present people with an array of articles of clothing and ask them to pick one to keep, they tend to pick the rightmost one. But if you then ask them to list the reasons they chose that article, no one says, “Because it was the one on the right.” They cite only the features of the objects themselves. Not having served in experiments in which the same items were presented in different orders, people have no grounds for knowing that a dumb factor like left-to-right position could be a cause of their behavior. And that’s a major problem for memories of what influenced us: None of us has taken part in the experiments that would isolate the causes of our choices in life.
[Ultimately,] chance must play an enormous role in development. We might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb, whether we got the top bunk or the bottom bunk, whether we were dropped on our head, whether we inhaled a virus. Needless to say, few people cite factors like these among their childhood influences..
Steven Pinker, How we may Have Become What We Are
Man! What withA all the delightfully absorbing work I’ve set myself to, I’m tremendously unexercised these days. Tonight I washed my teeth and it occurred to me half-jokingly that that was about all the exercise I was going to get for the day. It’s true.
Ese fue un subtitulo de la portada del Publico de hoy. Para ser honestos, no suelo tener el menor interes por los deportes pero lo lei de rapido solo por aquello de enterarme de lo mas relevante del dia. Lo curioso fue lo primero que pense al leerlo:
...interesante, “festejo ganandole”, mmm, “festejo ganandole”, interesante, no es una forma que uno ve muy a menudo, por que la habran escogido? “festejo ganandole”, como mas podrian haberlo escrito? a ver, a ver, mmm, a ver, “festejo…”, “festejo ganarle al..”!, muy bien, ah!, “festejo al ganarle..”, muy bien, ya son 2 formas alternas, cual es la diferencia entre ellas y la forma original, en verdad difieren en significado? bueno, pues, si, creo que si, con “Atlas festejo ganarle al Boca Juniors” estableces claramente que el Atlas festejo por haberle ganado al Boca Juniors, con “Atlas festejo al ganarle al Boca Juniors” tambien dices que festejo por haber ganado pero insinuas que tambien tenia otro motivo de festejo, finalmente, con “Atlas festejo ganandole al Boca Juniors” no dejas duda de que aparte de festejar por ganar, el Atlas definitivamente tenia otro motivo para festejar de antemano…
Estoy enfermo?
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
With the above text, Richard Feynman gave rise in 1974 to the concept of cargo cult science: pseudoscience in which only the trappings of science are cultivated. He makes a beautiful point through it and you should read that speech of his, it’s really good. In today’s yoga class, as my mind strayed during a ridiculously protracted baloney preaching, I chanced upon an interesting twist to it.
First, let me confess that I fell in love with yoga since my first class. I love the elegance, the gracefulness, the relaxation, the concentration, the self-awareness, the girl in green (a classmate), the austerity (only your body and a towel), the small daily improvements, the personal challenge of the perfect asana, the beauty and harmony of many postures, the sensuality of some, the ascetism of others, the breathing, the exhilaration that follows a class. I’m painfully stiff but I know I will get better. I want to. But this love only makes me loathe more the other, dark side of yoga: the mystical b.s., the astrology/chakra/aura/spirit/numerology/energy mumbo-jumbo.
Today I endured a particularly severe sermon (~40 min.) in which almost every esoteric subject save alien abductions was broached. When I decided I had had enough—and, believe me, I can be patient when listening to cranks—I stood up and prepared to leave. The teacher understood, laughed somewhat sarcastically, and wrapped the class with the closing posture. I thanked her for the class and left.
I knew that yoga carried such baloney baggage before I entered, of course, but I enrolled despite it. As much as the pundits (yogis) say they’re an inseparable whole, they aren’t, and I’m only interested in the exercise, the secular part. The funny thought that crossed my mind today was that, in a way, what I want is a cargo cult yoga.
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