Speed of Sound Is Too Slow For the Olympics 255
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."
First! (Score:3, Funny)
Free market solution (Score:1, Funny)
Highest bidder gets to hear the starting gun first
This saved me once (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First! (Score:5, Funny)
Appropriate, for once...
You must have been waiting for the sound.
Re:Why not use lights? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Speed of light (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest electrical stimuli - 240v should suffice
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Re:LED strip along the ground. (Score:4, Funny)
Then what would the blind athletes do?
Run after their dogs...
Re:Speed of light (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my track days, we were taught to go by the smoke of the pistol, not the bang.
For that to even be remotely effective, your track team must have smelled really really fast.
Re:Physics, people! (Score:5, Funny)
Great, now that the "real" athletes are also complaining about ping times, can we make FPS olympic?
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Speed of light (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest electrical stimuli - 240v should suffice
Better be DC or high freq AC (like a tesla coil) because an AC waveform has a longer wavelength than the kind of measurements they're already complaining about.
For example a anal probe activated at a voltage zero crossing would take around 5 ms to reach peak voltage at 50 hz, but the americans would whine because they're used to 60Hz which only takes 4ms to reach peak voltage. And the other competitors would whine because the 220 volt probe would reach the 110 volt level that the americans train with in only about 2 ms, whereas they're used to waiting until a voltage maximum at 5ms to react. As you can see even low frequency RF aka "power electronics" is all rather complicated. This is before power factor correction, where athletes with inductive or capacitive digestive systems would lead/lag and the nervous system is inherently current mode logic anyway (or is it? Some MD or bio guy needs to weigh in) (hmm, digestive system is shaped inductively all curly and stuff, but digestion is all about capacity aka a capacitive reactance... anyone other than space alien abductors got a smith chart plot of a human digestive system based on probe data?)
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:3, Funny)
"[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 [nytimes.com]
Re:I call bullshit. (Score:2, Funny)
Precisely one week and 13 cubits... in other words, 2 parsecs, 14 hours and 23 cents.