The stuff of champions

There's something rather special about being the best at the world in something. It really doesn't matter what it is. I was once, briefly, the world champion at speed reciting Hamlet's soliloquy. No, really. A friend and I went through the Guiness Book of Records the way you do, looking for likely records to be able to break, and this seemed feasible. We managed to record my young voice zipping through the soliloquy faster than the time in the book. The next day that popular TV show of the period Record Breakers came on. Guess what. Someone broke my record, before we could even send the tape in. Bugger.

Of course, athletics records are much more serious than speed reciting. (Why?) But sometimes the sports people get carried away with themselves. They suffer from a classic problem of the non-technical faced with data. They want to go into meaningless detail, and as a result, they produce records that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Take the 5,000 metres race. Apparently the IAF (International Athletic Federation) rules specify very precisely how long a running track should be, but inevitably they allow a margin for error. If you translate this error into typical top end running time for 5,000 metres it amounts to around a half second variation in the time it would take a runner to get around the 5,000 metres. So to declare anyone a new world champion based on breaking the record by less than half a second is entirely meaningless. Yet in 1985, someone was declared the new champion after breaking the record by 0.01 seconds.

This shows remarkable ignorance of the way numbers work on the part of the athletics people. It also makes me think how odd it is that we consider some world records more important than others. The athletic disciplines are ludicrously arbitrary. Why is running 5,000 metres something of world importance, but being the fastest person ever to hop round Leicester Square isn't? Both are feats of extreme physical exertion (I'm not sure why this matters, but there you go). Both make someone the best in the world. It's just so arbitrary.

I don't expect the powers-that-be to go for a hopping race any time soon, but they could, at least, recognize the limitations of their measurements and keep world records to realistic limits of accuracy.

Information on 5,000 metre measurements from Quantify! by Goran Grimvall

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog