Tag Archives: sports

• We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance
  Recently I saw a quick video from F1 comparing pit stop from the olden days and now. Not surprisingly, changing tires and refueling the car is a lot faster now due to advances in technology and processes. It’s a lot like sports. However, this article says there’s one other factor – finding the outlier athletes.

  We find a similar story in the NBA with Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal was the first 7-footer in the league who retained the power and agility of a much smaller man. Neither a beanpole nor a plodding hulk, he would have been an athletic 200-pounder if scaled down to 6 feet in height. When Shaq got the ball near the hoop, no man (or sometimes even two men) could stop him from dunking it. Soon after his entry into the league, basket frames had to be reinforced to prevent being destroyed by his dunks. After the Lakers won three championships in a row, the NBA was forced to change their rules drastically—allowing zone defenses—in order to reduce Shaq’s domination of the game.

• The weird world of kidnapping insurance
  A look at the world of kidnapping insurance, where a bunch of firms work in concert to keep fees low. It’s a strange life to tell yourself that you’re going to work every day so kidnappers won’t suffer inflation

  From Shortland’s perspective, that makes sound moral sense as well as sound business sense: By controlling the ransom payouts, you minimize the profits kidnappers make from each ransom, and thus minimize the money they can pump into their next kidnapping, or whatever other scheme the criminal or terrorist group they’re part of is working on. “If you left rich western families to negotiate these ransoms by themselves, they would probably do a lot more harm, and kidnapping would be a lot nastier, and more profitable for the kidnappers,” Shortland said. “Once you’re talking about multi-million dollar ransoms, then the people who can’t afford it — they get killed, or they just rot for years and years.”

• Building a Cathedral
  I wouldn’t have picked this article if not for the fire at Notre Dame. But it raises an interesting question as to why cathedrals take so long to build. I guess the short answer is a slow trickle of money results in slow construction, and slow construction means dramatic changes can occur

  As Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in The Black Swan, human lifetimes and the lifetimes of human projects seem to obey an opposite set of rules. For humans, “the older we get the less likely we are to live.” But once a project exceeds its due date, its estimated time to completion expands. While humans tend towards death, late projects become immortal. “The longer you wait,” writes Taleb, “the longer you will be expected to wait.”

• Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands
  While the article is about paper towels and air hand dryers, the deeper issue is that even in seemingly minor and trivial industries like this, there is a lot of lobbying and potentially fake science trying to make one side win.

  These were strange conclusions, because the Leeds study’s data was quite equivocal. The scientists sampled six different parts of the restrooms they visited. Only in two of these locations – on the floors, and on the surfaces of hand dryers or towel dispensers – did washrooms with dryers show appreciably more bacteria than those with paper towels. Even then, those higher numbers were half of those typically found on our own bathroom floors at home. Unless you were planning to caress the floor, it didn’t seem to matter

• ‘We all suffer’: why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed
  Every time I got to the Bay area, I think, wow this is a place where I wouldn’t want to live. Here’s some more reasons why.

  “It’s just not sustainable for a couple to live here,” he said. “A million-plus for a home with $300,000 down? Then when we have kids, $30,000 a year for private school? Who can afford that even making $300,000 a year? … There’s hundreds of other places in the country with the same restaurant culture or at least on par that cost half as much.”

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: pocket, sports