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3 Videos: John McAfee (2015), Jackie Stewart (1973), Yuval Noah Harari (2015)

December 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

There’s nothing quite like the IBT columns of antisocial antivirus expert John McAfee, pieces that read like PKD-esque fever dreams propelled by acute paranoia, actual knowledge and perhaps pharmaceuticals. In a recent article, he warned that Electromagnetic Pulse generators (or EMPs) could be used to destroy an American city at any moment. An excerpt:

EMPs can be generated in many ways. Much has been said about nuclear EMPs, but that threat concerns me far less than other, more specific means of generating EMPs. The US recently announced our own EMP weapon, which can be carried aboard a missile. Using a technology based on hydraulically compressing and decompressing rods made of specific elements, the device is able to create multiple EMPs very quickly.

The weapon can be focused to take out individual buildings within a city and can take out dozens of individual buildings in a single pass of the missile. I will admit that such technology is beyond the reach of the average individual. But what if the individual is not concerned with precision strikes and merely wants to take out an entire city block or the entire city? Well, that technology is readily available, cheap, and simple to construct.

…

I am not going to give a course on constructing EMP weapons. I am only trying to raise the awareness of the world to a real and imminent threat.

I also received many questions about how an EMP could kill people. The answer is easy. A large-scale localized attack that involved all of our power stations would leave us all permanently without power. An attack that included our water processing plants would leave us without potable water, except that which we could purchase at the supermarket.

Localized attacks on food processing plants, attacks on mass transportation and attacks on centralized communication organizations would leave us without food and communications. Attacks on oil processing plants would ultimately leave us without individual transportation. What percentage of the population do you think would survive such a catastrophe? And all of this without a single nuclear explosion.•

In our facacta political season, McAfee is, of course, running for President, decrying the cyber illiteracy of the average Washington representative. Despite being an erstwhile murder suspect, he’s not even close to the most deplorable candidate. Here he is in September announcing his campaign to Greta Van Susteren, a Scientologist with an unsustainable face.

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Racing legend Jackie Stewart was king of a sport in which his competitors–his friends–kept dying, one after another on the dangerous-as-can be-courses of the ’60s and early ’70s. The opening of Robert F. Jones 1973 Sport Illustrated article “There Are Two Kinds of Death“:

Contrasted with the current woes of the real world—the new Arab-Israeli war, the old Watergate maunder-ings—it might have seemed a week of minor tragedy on the Grand Prix circuit. But for John Young Stewart, 34, the finest road racer in the game, it was perhaps the most agonizing week of his life. A month earlier, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Stewart had captured his third world driving championship in five years. During the course of this racing season he had become the most successful Formula I driver ever, with 27 Grand Prix victories to his credit (compared with 25 for his late Scottish countryman, Jim Clark, and 24 for his idol, Argentina’s Juan Manuel Fangio). And certainly Stewart had outdone both of them in the main chance of racing: money.

Jackie Stewart is the canniest man ever to don a fireproof balaclava—and certainly the gutsiest ever to con a sponsor. Earning close to $1 million a season in prize money and other emoluments, Stewart seemed to have turned motor racing into some kind of a private treasure trove—and survived to enjoy it. Then why not retire?

That was the first source of his agony last weekend. At Watkins Glen for the 15th running of the U.S. Grand Prix, Stewart played coy with the question. Indeed, even his business agent claimed that the wee Scot was hung on the horns of that old sportsman’s dilemma: quit on a peak of success, or press on to try for even greater rewards? The business agent also was well aware that the timing of a retirement statement by a figure so prominent as Stewart could bring in lots of bucks, and perhaps the coyness was merely a question of timing to suck up more cash. “If Jackie were single,” said his lovely wife Helen, “there would be no question. He would continue to race. I would like to see him retire, but I cannot press him. No, there is nothing that could fill the role of racing for him if he were to quit.”

Stewart himself was brusque on the question. He sidestepped it with every slick word at his command—and they are as many and as evasive as the black grouse of Scotland’s moors. But still it all seemed a game.

Then, on qualifying day before the race, Stewart’s good friend and teammate, Francois Cevert, was killed in a smashup during practice. Stewart had already lost three close friends to the sport: Clark in 1968, Piers Courage and.Jochen Rindt in 1970. In his poignant account of that last tragic season in his recent book, Faster! A Racer’s Diary, Stewart had likened Grand Prix racing to a disease and wondered in painful print if he himself were not a victim. With Cevert’s death last Saturday, it seemed to many that Stewart must at last accept the prognosis. He must—finally—retire and let sad enough alone.•

A 1973 documentary about Formula One racing, known at various times as One by One, Quick and the Dead, and Champions Forever, this interesting period piece with a funked-up score focuses on Stewart, Peter Revson and their peers. Stacy Keach is the cool-as-can-be narrator, but Cévert sums it up simply and best, admitting, “steering is hard.”

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My favorite book published in the U.S. in 2015 is Sapiens, a brilliant work about our past (and future) by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In a New Statesman essay, the author argues that if we’re on the precipice of a grand human revolution–in which we commandeer evolutionary forces and create a post-scarcity world–it’s being driven by private-sector technocracy, not politics, that attenuated, polarized thing. The next Lenins, the new visionaries focused on large-scale societal reorganization, Harari argues, live in Silicon Valley, and even if they don’t succeed, their efforts may significantly impact our lives. An excerpt:

Whatever their disagreements about long-term visions, communists, fascists and liberals all combined forces to create a new state-run leviathan. Within a surprisingly short time, they engineered all-encompassing systems of mass education, mass health and mass welfare, which were supposed to realise the utopian aspirations of the ruling party. These mass systems became the main employers in the job market and the main regulators of human life. In this sense, at least, the grand political visions of the past century have succeeded in creating an entirely new world. The society of 1800 was completely destroyed and we are living in a new reality altogether.

In 1900 or 1950 politicians of all hues thought big, talked big and acted even bigger. Today it seems that politicians have a chance to pursue even grander visions than those of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. While the latter tried to create a new society and a new human being with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and supercomputers. In the coming decades, technological breakthroughs are likely to change human society, human bodies and human minds in far more drastic ways than ever before.

Whereas the Nazis sought to create superhumans through selective breeding, we now have an increasing arsenal of bioengineering tools at our disposal. These could be used to redesign the shapes, abilities and even desires of human beings, so as to fulfil this or that political ideal. Bioengineering starts with the understanding that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies. For four billion years natural selection has been tinkering and tweaking with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoebae to reptiles to mammals to Homo sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in the genome, the neural system and the skeleton were enough to upgrade Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – to Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers. Who knows what the outcome of a few more changes to our genome, neural system and skeleton might be? Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old sapiens body and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance and grow entirely new body parts.

On top of that, we are also developing the ability to create cyborgs.•

In a London TED Talk from earlier this year, Harari details why Homo sapiens came to rule the world, and why that development wasn’t always such a sure bet.

Old Print Article: Machines Have Ruined Prizefighting, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

December 5, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jack Dempsey, boxing champion nearly a century ago, was not a fan of machines, except when they benefited him. The heavyweight fancied himself a John Henry, ready to reduce robots to so many buttons and bolts. In his own way, he was an Ur-Kasparov, believing no “mechanical man” could conquer him, and by extension, humanity. They were both fooling themselves, of course.

Dempsey was outraged that in the Industrial Age, work in mining and blacksmithing had been taken from humans by machines, supposedly softening men, making it impossible to nurture great fighters. He railed against “gymnasium” pugilists, though, of course, those establishments turned out better boxers than the coal industry ever did.

It was funny because Dempsey himself was dandified and softened by the rise of the machines, the recipient of a new nose courtesy of cosmetic surgery, which was intended to make his face more presentable to Hollywood’s motion picture cameras. In the dotage of his association with the sport, when he entered the ring as a celebrity referee rather than a principal, Dempsey voiced his bitter feelings to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in an article on September 26, 1933.

Tags: Jack Dempsey

Old Print Article: The Electric Bicycle Is The Future Of Transportation, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1896)

November 27, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The sudden popularity of the Internet beginning in 1995 has an antecedent in the sweeping success of an earlier technology, that of the bicycle, which exploded in America in the 1890s in a way that could not have been comprehended just a decade earlier. From an oddity to a staple just like that. Not an intermittent fad like roller skates (and, later, blades), the bike quickly gained such a foothold that it seemed only the emergence of a dependable, affordable electric version was needed for it to become the primary transportation of the future. That’s not how it worked out, of course, but an article in the June 18, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published when that still seemed possible, even likely. As the piece states, some early versions of motorized bicycles were powered by kerosene, and Edison and Tesla were training their talents on the problem. The article’s opening follows.

“He Believes The Future Looks Smaller, More Durable, And More Versatile”

November 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jeff Beckham has written “The Future of Stadiums Might Be No Stadium At All,” a really smart Wired piece that looks at radically reducing the infrastructure of spaces that host sports and concerts and such.

Gigantic permanent structures only emerged in America when team sports became big business and population density reached critical mass. A century ago, only major prize frights could attract small cities of ticket buyers, so wooden insta-stadia capable of seating 50,000 to 100,000 were routinely built in a couple of months. The venues were razed soon after the bout. Tex Rickard built just such a momentary edifice for Jack Dempsey’s defense of the heavyweight title against Georges Carpentier on July 2, 1921. From the April 26, 1921 New York Times:

Although the plot embraces thirty-four acres, the particular land Rickard has contracted for includes only about six-and-one-half acres. Upon this stretch of ground the promoter will erect his giant arena with its proposed seating capacity of over 50,000. The start will be made on the arena just as soon as the ground is levelled. Rickard expects that the arena will be completed within fifty days, without rushing the workmen or necessitating overtime. It is estimated that 100 carloads of lumber will be used in its construction.•

Beckham’s piece focuses on the ideas of architect Dan Meis, who believes economics are demanding stadium downsizing, though he dreams of edifices that go far beyond one-off events. An excerpt:

“We keep falling over ourselves about what’s the next big board? What’s the next thing you’re going to put in stadiums?” said Meis, whose best known work is the Staples Center in Los Angeles. “In reality, I think it’s coming back to the best stadium would be not to build it at all or if there’s a way to do it in a temporary way and save all that money on infrastructure.”

Meis isn’t kidding about the ideal stadium being no stadium at all. He’s fascinated by the Palio de Siena, a centuries-old horse race that takes place in Tuscany’s Piazza del Campo. Nearly every day, the piazza stands as a grand public space in the center of town, but two times each year, it’s converted into an impromptu stadium where thousands of spectators flock to watch the race.

That pop-up stadium concept works better for events like the Olympics or World Cup, which come around every four years and may be hosted by countries without the means to fill those stadiums once the event is over. But another Meis concept — a building that changes, Optimus Prime-style, from a 20,000-seat basketball arena to a 35,000-seat soccer stadium — could provide a solution.

It sounds futuristic, but the transformable stadium has been a reality for more than a decade in Japan.•

Tags: Dan Meis, Jeff Beckham

3 Videos: Mount St. Helens (1980), Henry Miller (1969), Wilt Chamberlain (1962)

November 18, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

A couple months before its historic eruption on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens began to slowly awaken. Tourists toting binoculars went to the mountain to get a better look, but some experts warned them to not expect too much, predicting it very unlikely to be a major geological event. The experts were wrong. From the April 21, 1980 People magazine:

It was hardly Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but when Mount St. Helens—near Washington’s border with Oregon—began to gurgle seriously last month, geologists and thrill-seekers gathered from all over the world. They hoped to see one of the rarest and most spectacular of nature’s performances: a volcanic eruption. Not since Mount Lassen in California began seven years of activity in 1914 has a volcano in the lower 48 states put on such a show. Still, some watchers may be disappointed by Mount St. Helens. “People have this idea about lava from old South Sea movies,” says Donal Mullineaux, a volcanologist in the U.S. Geological Survey, “with everybody in sarongs hotfooting it away from this smoky, glowing stuff that comes oozing out of the crater and down the mountain like cake batter. Lava can be dangerous, sure, but that’s only a part of it.”

The rest of it—clouds of poisonous gas, searing hot winds and cascades of mud and rock—now seems unlikely at Mount St. Helens. Mullineaux, who had predicted an eruption in a scholarly 1975 article, is maintaining a vigilant calm. “The probability of a big, big eruption is very low,” he says. Asked if the gases already escaped pose a pollution threat, he smiles and says, “Any comment I could make would be facetious. I grew up in a paper-mill town.”•

The CBS News report three days after the volcano blew, with Dan Rather and his folksy whatthefuck subbing for Walter Cronkite.

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Most men (and women) lead lives of quite desperation, but from Brooklyn to Big Sur Henry Miller hollered. That resulted in some genius writing and some considerably lesser material. In 1961, the author explained in a Paris Review interview how he believed his tools shaped his writing:

Paris Review:

Do you edit or change much?

Henry Miller:

That too varies a great deal. I never do any correcting or revising while in the process of writing. Let’s say I write a thing out any old way, and then, after it’s cooled off—I let it rest for a while, a month or two maybe—I see it with a fresh eye. Then I have a wonderful time of it. I just go to work on it with the ax. But not always. Sometimes it comes out almost like I wanted it.

Paris Review:

How do you go about revising?

Henry Miller:

When I’m revising, I use a pen and ink to make changes, cross out, insert. The manuscript looks wonderful afterwards, like a Balzac. Then I retype, and in the process of retyping I make more changes. I prefer to retype everything myself, because even when I think I’ve made all the changes I want, the mere mechanical business of touching the keys sharpens my thoughts, and I find myself revising while doing the finished thing.

Paris Review:

You mean there is something going on between you and the machine?

Henry Miller:

Yes, in a way the machine acts as a stimulus; it’s a cooperative thing.•

Robert Snyder’s deeply enjoyable 1969 documentary of Miller in his middle years, when he had befriended, among many others, astrologer Sydney Omarr, a relationship which helped the author indulge his curiosity in the occult.

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Wilt Chamberlain was a hybrid of topdog and underdog, fully aware that all his greatness could never make the public quite love a Goliath. To merely be himself was to be unfair. In Allen Barra’s 2012 Atlantic appreciation of the late NBA, volleyball and track & field star, the writer compares the legendary basketball player favorably with Babe Ruth, and recalls the humble environs in which he recorded the NBA’s only triple-digit scoring performance. An excerpt:

The celebration of Wilt Chamberlain’s career that accompanied the 50th anniversary of his 100-point game last weekend was too short and passed too quickly.

Wilt Chamberlain was the Babe Ruth of pro basketball. Like Ruth, he was by far the most dominant force in his time, and quite possibly of all time. Like the Babe, Wilt was the lightning rod for interest in the sport in a time when it was badly needed. In Chamberlain’s case, he was more important to basketball than Ruth was to baseball.

Contrary to popular opinion, baseball was doing quite well at the turnstiles when Ruth came along and would have survived the stink of the Black Sox gambling scandal with or without him (though the recovery certainly would have taken longer). But without Wilt, who knows if the NBA would have made it from the 1960s—when it was scarcely one of the big three pro sports behind baseball and football—to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird boom of the late 1970s and the Michael Jordan tidal wave a few years later?

If you doubt this, consider one extraordinary fact: Wilt played his 100-point game not in New York or even in the Warriors’ home city of Philadelphia but in an odd-looking, plain concrete barn-like structure with an arched roof in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Warriors played several games a year in order to increase a fan base that wasn’t showing them overwhelming support in Philly.

Try and imagine the equivalent in baseball: Babe Ruth hitting his 60th home run in, say, Newark, New Jersey, at a Yankees “secondary” park in front of a handful of fans. If not for an unknown student listening to a late night rebroadcast of the game who thought to tape the fourth quarter on a reel-to-reel, we’d have no live coverage of the game at all.

Chamberlain’s triumph came at the Hershey Sports Arena. Today the HersheyPark Arena looks virtually the same, a practice facility for the AHL’s Hershey Bears and home ice for a local college that is also open for public skating. It’s easy to miss the notices that here Chamberlain played his landmark game: a small sign on a pole outside the main gates and a copy of the photo of Wilt holding up the handmade “100” in the back side of the lobby.

There is one primary difference between the careers of Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain: Ruth was—and is—regarded by most baseball analysts as the greatest player in his game. But basketball people have never quite been able to make up their minds about Wilt.•

Ed Sullivan interviews Chamberlain soon after his heroics in Hershey.

“He Did Try To Rig The Vote But For The US, Not For Qatar”

October 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

Sepp Blatter, a legitimate businessman, stepped down earlier this year as President of FIFA, which is essentially Tweed’s Tammany Hall with soccer balls. The deposed chairman sat for lunch with Malcolm Moore of the Financial Times and allowed that he is dishonest but not in the exact way people think he’s dishonest. Oy vey! An excerpt:

As we settle into our conversation, he quickly pinpoints the moment when Fifa’s troubles — and his downward spiral — began. “It is linked to this now famous date: December 2, 2010,” he says, referring the day he pulled Qatar’s name out of the envelope as host of the 2022 World Cup.

“If you see my face when I opened it, I was not the happiest man to say it is Qatar. Definitely not.” The decision caused outrage, even among those who do not follow football. “We were in a situation where nobody understood why the World Cup goes to one of the smallest countries in the world,” he says.

Blatter then drops a bombshell: he did try to rig the vote but for the US, not for Qatar. There had been a “gentleman’s agreement”, he tells me, among Fifa’s leaders that the 2018 and 2022 competitions would go to the “two superpowers” Russia and the US; “It was behind the scenes. It was diplomatically arranged to go there.”

Had his electoral engineering succeeded, he would still be in charge, he says.

“I would be [on holiday] on an island!” But at the last minute, the deal was off, because of “the governmental interference of Mr Sarkozy”, who Blatter claims encouraged Michel Platini to vote for Qatar. “Just one week before the election I got a telephone call from Platini and he said, ‘I am no longer in your picture because I have been told by the head of state that we should consider . . . the situation of France.’ And he told me that this will affect more than one vote because he had a group of voters.”

Blatter will not be drawn on motives.•

Tags: Malcolm Moore, Sepp Blatter

“I’m Not About To Go Out There Against A Guy Who’s Comin’ At Me With Big Dilated Pupils Unless I’m In The Same Condition”

October 25, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The Dallas Cowboys under GM Tex Schramm and control-freak coach Tom Landry favored bleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems, but according to psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Mandell’s The Nightmare Season, the San Diego Chargers of 1973 were hopped up on drugs intended to produce “rageful football syndrome.” Whenever anybody talks about the good old days when sports were “clean,” realize they’re being nostalgic for a yesterday that never actually existed.

From Barbara Wilkins’ 1976 People profile of the shrink and his controversial book:

I’ve tried every drug except cocaine,” says Dr. Arnold Mandell. “LSD? An incredibly beautiful, insightful experience. Lithium? It takes my bright edge off. Heroin? Just like morphine, a cosmically sensual experience. Marijuana? Not that interesting.”

Because Mandell, a psychiatrist, is a prominent researcher into brain chemistry and psychopharmacology, his experiments with dangerous drugs are understandable. But it is not so easy to comprehend why Dr. Mandell ever got involved professionally with the San Diego Chargers.

Actually, Mandell first became interested in football because of his son, Ross, now 13, and he was also a social friend of Chargers owner Gene Klein. And in 1972 San Diego was having such a miserable season that coach Harland Svare was willing to try anything. He asked Mandell to become resident shrink for a team which then included Duane Thomas, the All-Pro recluse, and Tim Rossovich, the linebacker notorious for eating glass. Observing the players close up, Mandell (who insisted that he not be paid) says he discovered that they were typecast: those who played on offense were conservative and more disciplined; most defensive players were free spirits.

Mandell also learned how much some team members depended on amphetamines. “Doc,” one player told him, “I’m not about to go out there against a guy who’s grunting and drooling and comin’ at me with big dilated pupils unless I’m in the same condition.”

Mandell says that 50 to 60 percent of the Chargers used drugs to produce “the rageful football syndrome.” But he argues, “This was not drug abuse. There was great self-discipline. They hated it, but it was drug use for function. Nobody used it off season.”

If Mandell had kept his ruminations to himself, he might still have friends on the team. Instead he wrote a book, The Nightmare Season, out this month, portions of which were published in a San Diego newspaper. His erstwhile friend Gene Klein says, “The book is totally inaccurate. It’s full of lies and innuendos.” And when Harland Svare was fired as general manager, he blamed Mandell’s book for “destroying my credibility” and vowed to “pursue all remedies available.”

“I love Gene,” psychiatrist Mandell says, “I love Harland. If they can’t see the love in the book, it makes me crazy.” The National Football League did not see it either, apparently, and banned Mandell unofficially from NFL locker rooms for life, as well as fining Klein, Svare and eight San Diego players.•

Tags: Arnold Mandell, Barbara Wilkins

“People Who Call Themselves America’s Team Are Talking More About Reaching The Alpha State Than The End Zone”

October 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In Julie Turkewitz’s bright New York Times article about the renaissance of sensory deprivation tanks, she mentions that it was a training method at one point of the Dallas Cowboys, a football team led from 1960 by a control-freak head coach in Tom Landry, who favored bleeding-edge technological, computer and neuropsychological systems (see here and here). Excerpts follow from two articles about the Cowboys utilization of tech and tanks.

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From Malcolm Moran’s 1981 New York Times’ article “Cowboys Floating into the 80’s“:

DALLAS— The clear plastic mats lead out of the locker room, past the blue and silver banner that says Cowboys, and into a smaller meeting room where the blackboard is clean. In this room, there is no need for X’s and O’s. The Dallas Cowboys who voluntarily enter the room climb into the team’s new sensory deprivation tank, a white fiberglass box that is eight feet long, four feet wide and four feet high. One by one, they float on their backs in water for an hour at a time in a peaceful world where their minds can be cleared of mistakes and pressures, and then refilled with information that can help win football games.

”The think tank,” said D.D. Lewis, the linebacker. The Dallas organization, given credit for bringing football into the computer age during the 1960’s, is trying something new for the 80’s. The Cowboys will experiment with a new teaching method that combines two ideas -closed-circuit television and a controlled environment.

Some research has shown that the use of videotape on television screens can increase learning. And the controlled environment – a dark, enclosed, weightless, timeless space aided by a heavy salt solution warmed to body temperature – can isolate the player from the world, eliminate distractions and simplify learning.

This environment is a long way from the traditional football classroom with its rows of chairs and reels of film. Soon after the film Altered States put the idea of floating into the national consciousness, the people who call themselves America’s Team are talking more about reaching the alpha state than the end zone. Once the television screen is installed directly over the player’s head as he floats on his back, the Cowboys will attempt to improve an athlete’s rate of learning, and eventually his performance, through the use of edited information given on an individual basis.

”I think you will see in five to 10 years there will be a drastic change in the utilization of videotape by football teams, or sports teams,” said Joe Bailey, the club’s vice president for administration. ”If you assume that coaches are teachers, and if you look into the classrooms of today, they’re probably a little bit different than the classrooms you were in. I think there’s a brave new world out there as far as the education process is concerned.”

Or, as Coach Tom Landry said, ”You just have to get an edge someplace.” How the Cowboys look for their edge, and what they do to achieve it, has been debated. Steve DeVore, one of the creators of SyberVision, a California company that has researched the concept of improving physical performance through visual stimulation, was critical of the way the Cowboys plan to use videotape as a learning tool in the tank environment. ”It’s a gimmick,” Mr. DeVore said.

Mr. DeVore said that one hour of training under the company’s system, which does not involve the use of tanks, can have the same effect as 10 hours on a practice field. ”It’s a powerful, powerful process,” Mr. DeVore said of the use of videotapes as a learning tool to improve physical performance. ”If it’s in the wrong hands, in an environment that cannot be controlled, it can be dangerous. It’s like fire. It can warm you, but if it gets out of control, it can burn you.”

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From Rick Telander’s 1981 SI article “Hell On Wheels Having Mastered The System“:

The real problem with emotion in the Dallas setup is that, like Dorsett’s resilience, it doesn’t compute. “America’s Team” has been skillfully manufactured to dispatch opponents with methodical precision. Any new device which may enhance the juggernaut is tested–the latest being a Sensory Deprivation Tank, a silent, water-filled coffin, in which, according to Dorsett, Kicker Rafael Septien lives–and anything that can be computerized, is. The motifs are conservatism (players are encouraged to marry, buy homes and settle in the community) and stability (the ruling quartet–owner Clint Murchison, Schramm, Brandt and Landry–has been with the club since its inception 21 years ago). The result is The System, and a team that is remarkably consistent–could any other club lose a quarterback like Staubach and not miss a beat?–but which seems to lack soul.•

Tags: Malcolm Moran, Rafael Septien, Rick Telander, Tom Landry, Tony Dorsett

3 Videos: Jerzy Kosinski (1984), The NFL In 2066 (2015), Henry Kissinger (1975)

October 8, 2015 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

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Who, after all, was Jerzy Kosinski? I wonder, after a while, if even he knew.

Like a lot of people who move to New York to reinvent themselves, Kosinksi was a tangle of fact and fiction that couldn’t easily be unknotted. He was lauded and reviled, labeled as brilliant and a plagiarist, called fascinating and a fraud. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between. In essence, he was much like the shadowy, misunderstood, paranoid characters from his own literature. One thing known for sure: He was a tormented soul, who ended his life by suicide in 1991, a plastic bag pulled over his face until he suffocated. He was a regular correspondent of sorts for David Letterman none too long before that. Here he is, in 1984, at the 23:35 mark, talking about overcoming his fear of drowning.

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A spate of game-related deaths to high school football players early this season combined with the reported marked decline in youth participation makes me think that Super Bowl C in 2066 will be played, if at all, by robots. (It should be noted that while young people playing football far less is associated with growing knowledge about brain-injury risk, all American youth sports have declined in the time of smartphones.) The game’s partially cloudy tomorrow hasn’t stopped the reporters at Wired and Sports Illustrated from pooling their talents for a mixed-media look at the future of the NFL, wondering what it will be like when America’s most popular single-game sports event reaches the century mark. There are considerations of players using cutting-edge technology, data-driven exercise, even gene editing, though I haven’t yet come across anything on concussion prevention.

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Baseball playoff season begins at the same time Henry Kissinger receives a biographical treatment, so here’s a video that mixes those two seemingly disparate subjects.

Like the first President he served, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became quite a baseball junkie, especially in his post-Washington career. At the 15:40 mark of this episode of The Baseball of World of Joe Garagiola, we see Kissinger, who could only seem competent when standing alongside that block of wood Bowie Kuhn, being honored at Fenway Park before the second game of the sensational 1975 World Series. During the raucous run by the raffish New York Mets in the second half of 1980s, both Nixon and Kissinger became fixtures at Shea Stadium. Nixon was known to send congratulatory personal notes to the players, including Darryl Strawberry. It was criminals rooting for criminals.

“It’s Still A Work In Progress”

October 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Initially, heart pacemakers were as big as ovens and external. Soon enough, they shrunk and found a home inside our bodies. Right now, most non-drug performance-enhancement methods are similarly external hardware, but they too will have their day to move within.

One example of that exterior computing power now being used to help athletes train smarter and perform better is IBM’s Watson, in one of its many post-Trebek roles. From Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post:

ORRECO, which has been working with the Oregon Track Club for more than six years and which recently joined the growing IBM Watson ecosystem, will teach Watson how to combine physiological test data, biomarker data, and data on nutrition and sleep into an individualized training program that the Oregon Track Club can use to optimize the schedules and performance of its runners. In addition, Coach Watson will be able to analyze the latest research findings from medical journals.

In doing so, Coach Watson will help to answer questions like “how hard” or “how long” a workout should be, whether an athlete experiencing fatigue should lower the intensity of workouts or take a few days off to recover, and how to optimize sleep schedules around travel. Coach Watson might also be able to spot signs of an upcoming injury weeks in advance through the continuous monitoring of biomarker data (e.g. an iron deficiency in the blood).

It’s still a work in progress — ORRECO chief executive Brian Moore told me that Watson is still a “junior coach coming up through the ranks” — but based on Watson’s previous success at extracting unexpected relationships from the data and proven ability to do trade-off analysis – there’s definitely potential for Coach Watson to provide an extra layer of knowledge for coaches.•

Tags: Brian Moore, Dominic Basulto

“Information Ties The Fans To The Game”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Even geniuses aren’t perfect: Billy Beane is the GM of the last-place Oakland A’s and Bill James Senior Advisor to the last-place Boston Red Sox, but they’re two of the pivotal figures in the development and popularization of Sabermetrics. In fact, James is likely the most influential of them all.

Of course, some bright people have the propensity to overthink things and outsmart themselves. For no real reason, Beane decided to trade affordable MVP candidate Josh Donaldson in the offseason for a couple of decent players and perhaps a great future shortstop, even though his team was built to compete now and playing in a very winnable division.

James’ sins haven’t been so slight, not just limited to puzzling player personnel decisions. He’s gone out of his way to defend Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who clearly looked the other way while a pedophilia scandal was brewing right in front of his black glasses. In this case, James’ contrarian streak, which made him great, also laid him low.

The two figures had never appeared in public together until last week’s business-disruption conference hosted by NetSuite. Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal gathered them and moderated a discussion about the future of Sabermetrics, etc. An excerpt:

WSJ:

Clearly, sabermetrics has improved the management of the game tremendously. How, if at all, has it made baseball a better game to watch?

Bill James:

I don’t know that it has, but we produce information, and information ties the fans to the game. People in a culture with no information about baseball have no interest in baseball. If you give people a little bit of information about baseball, they have a little bit of interest, and if you give them a lot of information about baseball, there’s the potential that they have a lot of interest. I’ve lived most of my life in the fans’ world and I see what I do as a fan’s activity. Granted, I work for the Red Sox. But I do know also that there are fans who go to sleep cursing my name.

Billy Beane:

It’s a different generation of fan that now has exposure and an interest in why things happen. Give them some rational reason for outcomes. We’re an information-hungry society, and one that is constantly trying to understand. I think there are a group of kids who love it for the numbers and love it for the information.

WSJ:

We’ve seen advances in particular areas of the game in recent years—pitch framing, defensive shifts—that are now better understood. What do you guys see as the aspect of the sport that is most in need of more research, more data and better understanding?

Billy Beane:

I’m jumping out of my chair on this one. It’s using analytics—and this sounds sort of non-field-related—but it’s injuries and medical. Even the healthcare industry is doing the same thing – trying to use big data to help solve healthcare. It’s the same in a simpler form for baseball or any sport and injuries. That’s the black swan for anyone involved in a baseball team—our injuries. Trying to predict them, minimize them, limit the downtime.•

Tags: Bill James, Billy Beane, Brian Costa

3 Videos: Ken Kesey & Mountain Girl (1966), Arturo Ripstein (2015), Benoit Mandelbrot (2010)

September 21, 2015 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Ken Kesey knew the truth could kill you just as easily as it could set you free, but he saw no other way. In 1966, the novelist and fellow Merry Prankster Mountain Girl met with the press after an arrest. In defending misfits hectored by police and government for refusing to try to fit in, he paraphrases a line from his novel of two years earlier, Sometimes A Great Notion: “A person should have the right to try to be as big as he believes it is in him to be.”

If someone was going to make a feature film about the lurid 2009 true-life story about two mini-luchador brothers being accidentally drugged to death in Mexico City by female thieves posing as prostitutes, it’s probably good that it’s Arturo Ripstein, who has sociological and psychological curiosity and whose Deep Crimson covered similar terrain. The movie, titled (in English) Bleak Street, screened at Toronto and Venice, and has thus far received mixed reviews.

In 2010, the last year of Benoit Mandelbrot’s life, Errol Morris pointed his Interrotron at the mathematician who recognized patterns in nature that nobody else did and gave us fractals. Morris himself often deals in fractals, chipping away pieces of his subject’s minds that perfectly represent the greater self.

“We Don’t Give A Damn If Einstein Used Artificial Means Of Cognitive Enhancement To Make His Contributions To Science”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In sports, as in life, there is no level playing field, never has been.

The idea of purity in athletics is deeply hypocritical. Some competitors have greater natural talents and more advantageous body types and even organs than others. Some possess a special genetic makeup which allows them to naturally beat drug tests, while most others have none. In various leagues, there are drugs genuinely helpful for recovery from injury which are banned under any circumstances, while others, far murkier in legitimacy, are allowed with permission. Even in the Olympics, known for its strictness, fewer than half the athletes are tested at any Games. And when you look at other jobs, from concert musician to action-movie star, everything from beta blockers to HGH is used regularly. While these performances aren’t competitions on the granular level, vying for such opportunities certainly is a contest akin to sport.

In his Boston Globe essay, “Let Athletes Dope,” philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö makes a moral argument for allowing competitors to juice, etc., arguing that our obsession with fetishizing natural strength borders on Social Darwinism. He makes a compelling case, but here’s the thing: Sports aren’t only about athletic displays or morality. They’re also, even on the amateur level, a business that has practical concerns and must remain attractive to spectators, often huge numbers of them.

Boxing declined precipitously when consciousness became raised about brain damage, and the same may happen to other sports which carry similar risks. Likewise, drug usage and its attendant health problems (and deaths) could be the end of such competitions. And athletes, being hyper-competitive, would probably push unchecked usage beyond all bounds of sense, going so far as to almost create an Uncanny Valley Effect. We like great athletes because they’re different than us, but also like them because they’re similar to us. (Tännsjö acknowledges there’s a chance that allowing PEDs could end the popularity of elite sports.)

The weakest part of the philosopher’s argument is his belief that we can enforce certain limits within this new permissiveness he urges. Even if there were boundaries on such drug use–you can use this much but no more–some athletes would then cheat on those parameters. There are those who will always look for a new edge and no amount of transparency will halt that.

Testing, though far from perfect, probably limits usage to a degree and somewhat inhibits health problems. But no one should really get too moralistic about it because there’s no great solution. My assumption is gene editing will further complicate the debate sooner than we think.

An excerpt:

The notion that natural strength deserves moral admiration is utterly strange. We do not accept this line of reasoning outside of elite sport.

Consider how students are accepted at a musical conservatory. They play before a jury. It is crucial to perform not only well but better than other applicants. Suppose two applicants, Brian and John, play before the jury. Brian is more talented than John. Both are nervous. John, however, has taken beta blockers, Brian has not. The drugs help, and John performs better. He is accepted. This is clearly the wrong decision by the jury. This seems similar to the sport contest. It is very different, however.

The reason why Brian should be accepted and not John has to do with efficiency. It is a waste of pedagogical resources to spend them on John, who is less talented. However, the fact that John enhanced his skill with artificial means is not a problem as such. The beta blockers could have been offered to both or to none. It doesn’t matter.

Once the person has graduated from the conservatory, it matters even less what means he resorts to in order to play well, artificial or natural. In music, and in the sciences and arts in general, we do show admiration, of course. What we admire, however, are the outputs of the artists and scientists, the artifacts — not the artists and scientists in themselves.

There are, of course, Tchaikovsky competitions and Nobel prizes in arts and sciences. But we do not take this quite seriously. And, in particular, it is not natural skill we favor and praise. We don’t give a damn if Einstein used artificial means of cognitive enhancement to make his contributions to science. Our interest is in the contributions themselves, not in the man, and, in particular, not in his natural talents.•

Tags: Torbjörn Tännsjö

“Want To Buy Stock Linked To The Brand Of Angels Rookie Left-Hander Andrew Heaney?”

September 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

As Ken Rosenthal reports at Fox Sports, Andrew Heaney has become the first Major League Baseball player to agree to sell stock in his future earnings. For 10% of all he makes through salary, endorsements and personal appearances during his playing career, the Angels rookie pitcher will receive $3.34 million.

That seems like a really bad financial decision to me on the part of the player and also the stockholders, should they emerge. Heaney received a $2.6 million signing bonuses, has earned the major-league minimum $507.5K this year and will receive slightly more in 2016. If wise about his future, he’ll hold on to as much of this money as possible until when and if he earns much bigger amounts.

He’s a pitcher and his arm could blow out at any moment, but he probably could buy insurance for the next couple of years until he reaches arbitration, at which time he’ll likely be earning far more in a single season than the stake he accepted. (I should point out that Heaney is very talented, perhaps not an ace, but better than average.)

Shareholders will only earn returns if Heaney makes in excess of $33.4 million dollars, which is also far from a guarantee. It seems more likely than not to be a lose-lose situation.

From Rosenthal:

Want to buy stock linked to the brand of Angels rookie left-hander Andrew Heaney? Fans will soon get that chance.

Heaney, 24, has become the first baseball player to enter into a brand contract with Fantex, the company announced on Thursday.

Under the terms of the deal, Heaney will receive $3.34 million in exchange for 10 percent of all future earnings related to his brand, including player contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees.

The agreement is contingent on Fantex obtaining the financing necessary to pay the purchase price. The shares are not yet up for sale, and Heaney, his agents and Fantex officials cannot yet comment.

Both Major League Baseball and the players union consented to Heaney’s deal, which could be the first of several involving major leaguers. …

The union also had reservations, including Heaney’s giving up a sizable percentage of his future earnings and risking disclosure on a broad number of issues, including injuries and potential discipline, sources said.

The deal, however, could benefit the union in other ways. Heaney already has received a $2.6 million signing bonus as the No. 9 overall pick in the 2012 draft. Now, with nearly $6 million in earnings, he likely will be less inclined to sign a below-market extension.•

Tags: Andrew Heaney, Ken Rosenthal

A Brief Note From 1854 About An Athlete’s Death

September 2, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 2, 1854 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Tags: Captain Barclay, Robert Barclay Allardice

“The Funeral Business Is A Great Training Ground Because It Teaches You Service”

August 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Impresario is what they used to call those like Steve Ross of Warner Communications, whose mania for mergers allowed him a hand in a large number of media and entertainment ventures, making him boss and handler at different times to the Rolling Stones, Pele and Dustin Hoffman. One of those businesses the erstwhile funeral-parlor entrepreneur became involved with was Qube, an interactive cable-TV project that was a harbinger if a money-loser. That enterprise and many others are covered in a brief 1977 People profile. The opening:

In our times, the courtships and marriages that make the earth tremble are no longer romantic but corporate. The most legendary (or lurid) figures are not the Casanovas today. They are the conglomerateurs, and for sheer seismic impact on the popular culture, none approaches Steven J. Ross, 50, the former slacks salesman who married into a mortuary chain business that he parlayed 17 years later into Warner Communications Inc. (WCI). In founder-chairman Ross’s multitentacled clutch are perhaps the world’s predominant record division (with artists like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell); one of the Big Three movie studios (its hot fall releases include Oh, God! and The Goodbye Girl); a publishing operation (the paperback version of All the President’s Men, which was also a Warner Bros, film); the Atari line of video games like Pong, which inadvertently competes with Warner’s own TV producing arm, whose credits include Roots, no less. The conglomerate is furthermore not without free-enterprising social consciousness (WCI put up $1 million and owns 25 percent of Ms. magazine) or a redeeming sense of humor (it disseminates Mad).

Warner’s latest venturesome effort is bringing the blue-sky of two-way cable TV down to earth in a limited experiment in Columbus, Ohio. There, subscribers are able to talk back to their TV sets (choosing the movie they want to see or kibitzing the quarterback on his third-down call). An earlier Ross vision—an estimated $4.5 million investment in Pelé by Warner’s New York Cosmos—was, arguably, responsible for soccer’s belated breakthrough in the U.S. this year after decades of spectator indifference. Steve is obviously in a high-rolling business—Warners’ estimated annual gross is approaching a billion—and so the boss is taking his. Financial writer Dan Dorfman pegs Ross’s personal ’77 earnings at up to $5 million. That counts executive bonuses but not corporate indulgences. On a recent official trip to Europe in the Warner jet, Steve brought along his own barber for the ride.

En route to that altitude back in the days of his in-laws’ funeral parlor operation, Ross expanded into auto rentals (because he observed that their limos were unprofitably idle at night) and then into Kinney parking lots. “The funeral business is a great training ground because it teaches you service,” he notes, though adding: “It takes as much time to talk a small deal as a big deal.” So, come the ’70s, Ross dealt away the mortuary for the more glamorous show world. Alas, too, he separated from his wife. •

Tags: Steve Ross

“It Is Kind Of Dehumanizing”

August 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who’ve done brilliant work (here and here) on the NFL’s existential concussion problem and yet still somehow are passionate Niners fans, have written an excellent ESPN The Magazine piece about Chris Borland, the football player who retired after his rookie season to safeguard his health.

The former San Francisco linebacker’s preemptive attempt at self-preservation was a shot across the bow, a shocking move the league hadn’t experienced since the 1960s, when so-called Hippie players voluntarily left the game and its militaristic nature during Vietnam Era. Borland’s decision made news, as you might expect, and he became something of a reluctant political football.

The ESPN article reveals the NFL’s response to Borland’s decision was, well, NFL-like: tone-deaf, corporate and petty. Although he’d left the game, the former player was asked to take a “random” drug test almost immediately. It seems the league wanted to deflate his stance and prove he retired to avoid detection over illegal substances. Unless it was a remarkable coincidence, the NFL hoped to paint Borland a fraud and thereby negate his very valid concerns.

There’s no way humans can safely play football. No helmet can preserve a head from whiplash–in fact the modern one is a weapon that increases the occurrences. People who profit from the sport can make believe otherwise, but there’s no way out but down. Borland and others who’ve made a quick exit, and the stalwarts who’ve awakened to the game’s toll, have underlined that reality.

An excerpt:

Borland has consistently described his retirement as a pre-emptive strike to (hopefully) preserve his mental health. “If there were no possibility of brain damage, I’d still be playing,” he says. But buried deeper in his message are ideas perhaps even more threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction  he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains.

Borland has complicated, even tortured, feelings about football that grow deeper the more removed he is from the game. He still sees it as an exhilarating sport that cultivates discipline and teamwork and brings communities and families together. “I don’t dislike football,” he insists. “I love football.” At the same time, he has come to view it as a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it.

“Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing,” he said during a series of conversations over the spring and summer. “It’s like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you’re the actors in it. You’re complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it’s a trivial thing at its core. It’s make-believe, really. That’s the truth about it.”

How one person can reconcile such opposing views of football — as both cherished American tradition and trivial activity so violent that it strips away our humanity — is hard to see. Borland, 24,  is still working it out. He wants to be respectful to friends who are still playing and former teammates and coaches, but he knows that, in many ways, he is the embodiment of the growing conflict over football, a role that he is improvising, sometimes painfully, as he goes along.•

Tags: Chris Borland, Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru

“Exley Would Spend His Twenties As The Victim Of His Own Deep Emotional Maladies”

August 10, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

In my teens, I read the books of Fred Exley’s “Fan” fictional-memoir trilogy one after another, and I remember hoping to never be within a million miles of someone as fucked up and frightening as the author’s doppelganger. That Exley is a fascinating character but also the height (and depth) of American male insecurity: violent, self-pitying, alcoholic, furious, a mess. He realizes too intently that he’s on the wrong side of an ugly score.

The second and third volumes are so-so, but the original, A Fan’s Notes, is a searing, heartbreaking thing, and everyone who’s picked up a copy probably thought of it again this weekend when hearing of Frank Gifford’s death. I know I did.

The USC and Giants great was the “star” to Exley’s “fan,” and the segment about the back running headlong into a Chuck Bednarik guillotine, which put him in the hospital for ten days and on the sidelines for 18 months, is unforgettable. If Gifford, the golden idol, could be felled by life, what chance did Ex have in the bleachers?

At Grantland, Fred Schruers has a beautifully written article about the literary “relationship” which begat a real one. An excerpt:

Ex, as he called himself and answered to among friends, had begun the fixation on Gifford that led to this nostalgia-and-booze-soaked threnody of dysfunction around 1951, when both men were enrolled at USC. Gifford, a converted quarterback and defensive back who became a halfback his senior year and slashed for four touchdowns against Ohio State, was campus royalty; Ex was a legendarily hard-drinking English major. Like Gifford, Exley would head to New York, having been raised upstate in Watertown as the son of a crusty semi-pro footballer. Before he truly discovered his great gift — striving to redeem his own scattered life in long, lapidary sentences touched with wit and pathos — Exley would spend his twenties as the victim of his own deep emotional maladies. He would know a depression that led to electroshock therapy. In his three main works, he would explicate a painful grapple with attempts to capture the love of the kind of unreachable American princesses he longed for.²

Though he never saw Frank play in college, Exley would understand the mythic heft of this transformed oil driller’s son who became an All-American. Exley’s Fitzgeraldian tangle of thoughts about Gifford only deepened as no. 16’s NFL career soared. In one mid-novel excursion, Exley explains his own role as a failing writer among the working stiffs around him in the $1 bleacher seats:

It was very simple really. Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his … he became my alter ego, that part of me had its being in the competitive world of men …

Tags: Frank Gifford, Fred Schruers, Frederick Exley

“My Brother — The Anti-Tebow”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

One positive outcome of our newly decentralized media is that all of society is now a long tail, with room for far more categories of beliefs and lifestyles, whether someone is Transgender or Libertarian or Atheist.

Case in point: Houston Texans star Arian Foster. Religion goes with football the way it does with war, perhaps because they’re two activities where you might want to pray you don’t get killed, but Foster, who’s played in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire college and pro career, doesn’t believe anyone is watching over him except for the replay assistant in the NFL booth. The former Muslim is now a devout atheist who offers a respectful Namaste bow after a TD but does not pray in a huddle. In an ESPN Magazine article, Tim Keown profiles the running back as he publicly discusses his lack of religion for the first time. An excerpt:

THE HOUSE IS a churn of activity. Arian’s mother, Bernadette, and sister, Christina, are cooking what they proudly call “authentic New Mexican food.” His older brother, Abdul, is splayed out on a room-sized sectional, watching basketball and fielding requests from the five little kids — three of them Arian’s — who are bouncing from the living room to the large playhouse, complete with slide, in the front room. I tell Abdul why I’m here and he says, “My brother — the anti-Tebow,” with a comic eye roll.

Arian Foster, 28, has spent his entire public football career — in college at Tennessee, in the NFL with the Texans — in the Bible Belt. Playing in the sport that most closely aligns itself with religion, in which God and country are both industry and packaging, in which the pregame flyover blends with the postgame prayer, Foster does not believe in God.

“Everybody always says the same thing: You have to have faith,” he says. “That’s my whole thing: Faith isn’t enough for me. For people who are struggling with that, they’re nervous about telling their families or afraid of the backlash … man, don’t be afraid to be you. I was, for years.”

He has tossed out sly hints in the past, just enough to give himself wink-and-a-nod deniability, but he recently decided to become a public face of the nonreligious.•

Tags: Arian Foster, Tim Keown

Old Print Article: “Walking on Water,” New York Times (1886)

July 31, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

The year before “Professor” Alphonse King, whose academic credentials were questionable, reportedly crossed the Niagara River on a water bicycle, he tried to traverse its channel with tin shoes of his own invention. Each weighed 30 pounds, and the results were unsurprisingly mixed. From the December 12, 1886 New York Times:

Buffalo–An attempt was made to-day to outrival the feats of Donovan, Graham, Hanslitt, Potts and Allen in braving the terrors of Niagara, which though a failure in one way, was a success in another. Mr. Alphonse King, who is the inventor of a water shoe, gave exhibitions some years ago in this country and Mexico and not long ago in Europe. He gave one in the Crystal Palace in London, and while there attracted the attention of Harry Webb, an old-time manager, who made him an offer of a year’s engagement to come to this country. While here some time ago Mr. King had looked over Niagara River below the Falls and believed that he could walk across the channel on the patent shoes. He came to this country four weeks ago and has since that time been in New-York City practicing for the trip. While there, Thomas Bowe, hearing of King’s determination to attempt the trip, made a wager of $1,500 with Webb that King could not walk 100 feet in the current. The money was deposited with a New-York newspaper, and on Friday afternoon Messrs. King and Webb, accompanied by A.C. Poole, of Poole’s Eighth Street Theatre, reached the Falls.

The trip to-day gave King two cold water baths, and demonstrated that while he could walk with or against the current all right it was impossible to walk across the river because of the eddies, which twice upset them. He retired confident that what he set out to do could not be done. King’s ‘shoes’ are of tin, 32 inches long, 8 inches wide, sloping at the top, and 9 inches deep. Each weighs 30 pounds. They are air-tight and have in the middle an opening large enough to admit the feet of the wearer. At the bottom are a series of paddles, which operate automatically as fins.•

“Nature Is Not Neat”

July 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I argued yesterday that Indian sprinter Dutee Chand should be able to compete against other women, despite a high testosterone level, because all elite athletes, not just her, have considerable natural advantages of one kind or another. (And we’re not even sure that a high T-level is an athletic edge.) Some basketball players have longer wingspans, some swimmers superior lung capacity. No one penalizes them. I wonder if the protest against Chand is caused by ignorance of biology or if it’s provoked by an unwitting bigotry over a challenge posed to traditional sex roles.

Such boundaries aren’t always clear, especially in age when sexual identity is in flux, but a total absence of them would result in a single competition for both sexes, something that might be devastating to women in sports like basketball, where size matters greatly.

In a really smart New York Times piece, Juliet Macur takes a deeper look at the complex issue. She doesn’t believe there’s an easy solution, but that all roads forward should crossed delicately, with respect for the athletes. An excerpt:

The arbitration panel in the Chand case is at least trying to inch closer to a solution. But as [Dr. Eric] Vilain suggested, there might be no solution.

He believes that track’s governing body won’t be able to prove that women with hyperandrogenism have a great advantage over other women because it is impossible to determine that high testosterone equals a big advantage. Too many other factors go into an athlete’s success, like nutrition and training, he said. Yet the court seems to require a clear cause and effect to consider the I.A.A.F.’s rule fair.

“Looking at this does not compute for me,” said Vilain, who is an expert on the biology of intersexuality and helped formulate the International Olympic Committee’s rules on hyperandrogenism.

And that leads us back to something the arbitration panel said in its decision: “Nature is not neat.”

So the way sports officials handle this issue won’t be neat, either, because maybe it can’t be neat.•

Tags: Dutee Chand, Eric Vilain, Juliet Macur

“Robotics Is A Natural Extension”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Robotics will likely play a big role in the future of spectator sports, though I don’t envision the discipline taking over ESPN in prime time in the near future. Auto racing is, of course, already a human-machine hybrid, but are familiar athletics to be encroached upon by AI or will robotic-specific sports rise? Are drones to be the new chariots?

In a Medium article, Cody Brown, who’s more bullish on robot athletics in the near term than I am, gives seven reasons for his enthusiasm. An excerpt:

3.) Top colleges fight over teenagers who win robotics competitions.

If you’re good at building a robot, chances are you have a knack for engineering, math, physics, and a litany of other skills top colleges drool over. This is exciting for anyone (at any age) but it’s especially relevant for students and parents deciding what is worth their investment.

There are already some schools that offer scholarships for e-sports. I wouldn’t be surprised if intercollegiate leagues were some of the first to pop up with traction.

5.) Rich people are amused by exceptional machines.

There is a reason that Rolex sponsors Le Mans. A relatively small number of people attend the race but it’s an elite mix of engineers and manufactures. Many of the people who became multimillionaires in the past 20 years got it from The Internet or some relation to the tech industry. They want to spend their money on what amuses them/their friends and robotics is a natural extension. Mark Zuckerberg recently gave one of the top drone racers in the world (Chapu) a shoutout on Facebook.•

Tags: Cody Brown

“The Issue Bemuses Governing Bodies And Riles Fans And Athletes”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Elite-level athletes are born with all sorts of genetic advantages. Some are related to lungs and hearts, some to muscles and body type. Michael Phelps couldn’t have been better built in a laboratory for swimming, from leg length to wingspan. Usain Bolt, that wonder, has an innate biological edge to go along with cultural factors that benefit Jamaican runners. There’s no such thing as a level playing field.

So, I’m puzzled when a female competitor with a hormone level that’s naturally elevated into what’s considered male territory is held up to scrutiny. Apart from having to do with sexual characteristics, how is it any different?

The Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, who has high natural levels of testosterone, has thankfully been ruled eligible to compete despite protests. From John Branch at the New York Times:

The final appeals court for global sports on Monday further blurred the line separating male and female athletes, ruling that a common factor in distinguishing the sexes — the level of natural testosterone in an athlete’s body — is insufficient to bar some women from competing against females.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, based in Switzerland, questioned the athletic advantage of naturally high levels of testosterone in women and immediately suspended the “hyperandrogenism regulation” of track and field’s governing body. It gave the governing organization, known as the I.A.A.F., two years to provide more persuasive scientific evidence linking “enhanced testosterone levels and improved athletic performance.”

The court was ruling on a case, involving the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, that is the latest demonstration that biological gender is part of a spectrum, not a this-or-that definition easily divided for matters such as sport. It also leaves officials wondering how and where to set the boundaries between male and female competition.

The issue bemuses governing bodies and riles fans and athletes. Among those who testified in support of the I.A.A.F. policy was the British marathon runner Paula Radcliffe, who holds the event’s world record among women. According to the ruling, Radcliffe said that elevated testosterone levels “make the competition unequal in a way greater than simple natural talent and dedication.” She said that other top athletes shared her view.•

Tags: Dutee Chand, John Branch

“Today, Seeing These Clones Is More Normal For Me”

July 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Cloned sheep once gave humans nightmares, but the science has quietly insinuated itself into the world of polo, thanks to star Adolfo Cambiaso, who impetuously saved cells from his best stallion, Aiken Cura, as the horse was being prepared for euthanasia, its leg ruined. There are now dozens of cloned versions of champion polo ponies, some of whom are competing on the field of play.

In a really smart Vanity Fair article, Haley Cohen explores how cloning science, which dates back to sea-urchin experiments in 1885, came to the sport of mounts and mallets. Oddly, it involves Imelda Marcos. And, yes, there is discussion about using the same methods to clone humans. An excerpt:

As the pair made their way toward Cambiaso’s stabling area, the exhausted Aiken Cura’s front left leg suddenly gave out. When Cambiaso felt the horse begin to limp beneath him, he leapt out of his saddle and threw his blue-and-white helmet to the ground in anguish.

“Save this one whatever it takes!” he pleaded, covering his face with his gloves. But the leg had to be amputated below the knee, and eventually Cambiaso—whose team won the Palermo Open that year and would go on to win the tournament another five times—was forced to euthanize his beloved Cura.

Before he said his final good-bye, however, he had a curious request: he asked a veterinarian to make a small puncture in the stallion’s neck, put the resulting skin sample into a deep freeze, and store it in a Buenos Aires laboratory. He remembers, “I just thought maybe, someday, I could do something with the cells.”

His hope was not in vain. With the saved skin sample, Cambiaso was able to use cloning technology to bring Aiken Cura back to life. These days, a four-year-old, identical replica of Cambiaso’s star stallion—called Aiken Cura E01—cavorts around a flower-rimmed field in the Argentinean province of Córdoba, where he has begun to breed and train for competition.

Now 40 years old, Cambiaso is ruggedly handsome, with long brown hair, covetable bone structure, and permanent stubble. But in spite of his athleticism, good looks, and wealth, he is surprisingly shy. Walking across the Palermo polo field, where he’s come to watch his oldest daughter play, he speaks in short spurts, as if he would rather not be talking to a stranger. Staring into the distance, he says, “Today, seeing these clones is more normal for me. But seeing Cura alive again after so many years was really strange. It’s still strange. Thank goodness I saved his cells.”•

Tags: Adolfo Cambiaso, Haley Cohen

“Listen To John Newcombe Explain The Secret Of An Effective Backhand”

July 12, 2015 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

In 1974, the mad geniuses at K-Tel tried to convince consumers they should take tennis lessons, via LP record, from three-time Wimbledon champ John Newcombe.

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