In Praise of the Gyratory Circus

There’s a fairly remarkable article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly, called “Distracting Miss Daisy,” in which the author, John Staddon, argues that “the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents.”

Here’s his take on top signs:

Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

The larger point is that “By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous.”

Staddon’s proposal is to adopt something like the British traffic system, including the roundabout: “when traditional intersections in the U.S. have been replaced by roundabouts, collisions have typically been reduced by about 40 percent, and fatalities by up to 90 percent.”

If you drive in the U.S. (or Canada), I highly recommend reading the entire article (it isn’t long), though afterward you may behave like I did, like a traffic libertarian.

I also recently read a short paper by Joel Fajans and Melanie Curry, both bike commuters from Berkeley, Calif., titled “Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs” (FYI, it’s a PDF. The image above is from the article.) Fajans is a physicist, and tackles the problem by looking at how many watts of propulsion an average cyclist generates.

For example, on a street with a stop sign every 300 feet, calculations predict that the average speed of a 150-pound rider putting out 100 watts of power will diminish by about forty percent. If the bicyclist wants to maintain her average speed of 12.5 mph while still coming to a complete stop at each sign, she has to increase her output power to almost 500 watts. This is well beyond the ability of all but the most fit cyclists.

Then the authors put the estimates to the test on a bike route in their home town, which happens to run parallel to a busier route which has fewer stops. In two tests, he was 30 to 39 percent faster.

Because the extra effort required on California is so frustrating, both physically and psychologically, many cyclists prefer [the busier route to the bike route], despite safety concerns. They ride … the official bike route only when traffic on Sacramento gets too scary.

The authors note that “a cyclist who rolls through a stop at 5 mph needs 25 percent less energy to get back to 10 mph than does a cyclist who comes to a complete stop.”

Clearly, stop signs are tricky for bicyclists. On one hand, they increase safety by decreasing the number of cars on a road, and slowing the remaining ones. On the other hand, they make cyclists work much harder to maintain a reasonable speed. For a commuter choosing between a car and a bicycle, the extra exertion can be a serious deterrent.

If you’re not a bike commuter, you may not think this is a big deal. But it is. Many commuters can’t shower at work, so they don’t want to break a sweat. Luckier ones like me can shower, but on weeks when we commute all week, we get run down from the effort (which include going over speed bumps, a great example of a traffic calming device that we face — only without shock absorbers).

I’m thinking the roundabout is the solution for this, too. Motorists would be forced to look for obstacles in the road; cyclists wouldn’t have to come to a complete stop unless traffic was heavy. Plus, roundabouts would help increase traffic flow, instead of the irritating stop-start experience of driving in a residential neighborhood.

BTW, the title of this blog post comes from an anecdote in Bill Bryson’s excellent book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way. He relates an anecdote that the word roundabout was actually coined by an American living in England, who was working on some BBC commission on English. Before the American’s improvement, a roundabout was known as a “gyratory circus”!

LPGA to its 121 Foreign Players: Learn English, or Get Suspended

The LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association) tour recently announced that it will require all its players to speak English starting in 2009.

”Why now? Athletes now have more responsibilities and we want to help their professional development,” deputy commissioner Libba Galloway told The Associated Press. ”There are more fans, more media and more sponsors. We want to help our athletes as best we can succeed off the golf course as well as on it.”

Help them? Is that helping them like putting in a foreign language requirement, and then not offering courses to help meet it?

Help them? As in requiring them to learn a foreign language in a year—or face a suspension—when most people spend years learning a foreign language? Actually, Galloway said in a press conference that should a player get suspended, “What we would do is work with them on where they fell short, provide them the resources they need, the tutoring . . . and when we feel like they need to be evaluated again, we would evaluate.”

(Though it wasn’t clear from the story, a “Suspend first, tutor later” policy sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. My guess is that one of the first English words foreign players will learn is draconian.)

“The bottom line is, we don’t have a job if we don’t entertain,” LPGA Tour player and president of the executive committee Hilary Lunke told Golfweek. “In my mind, that’s as big a part of the job as shooting under par.”

It’s true that the biggest part of a tournament’s bottom line comes from the pro-am, and if LPGA players can’t speak English, they can’t socialize with the predominantly English-speaking amateurs who pay to play with them.

And as ESPN’s Bob Harig pointed out, it’s true that it’s in a player’s best interest to learn English. This is where they’ll be spending most of their time, so their lives will be easier if they can conduct their affairs (travel, order food in restaurants, keeping sponsors happy) in English.

But making it a requirement is unfair.

It’s a rule that affects Foreign players only, who will likely have to bear added time and expense to meet it. That’s like asking English speaking players to work full-time, and non-English-speaking players to work double-time.

”This is an American tour,” one tournament director said. ”It is important for sponsors to be able to interact with players and have a positive experience.”

Actually, the LPGA has 121 international competitors from 26 countries, and 45 from South Korea alone—that makes it an international tour.

So why not treat it as such? The only way to make an English-language requirement fair tour-wide would be to require English-speaking tour players to learn a second language in the same amount of time. (While we’re on the subject of fairness, LPGA executives could lead by example and learn a foreign language—in addition to their regular duties.)

Besides, think how happy sponsors would be if an American golf star went overseas and promoted the game and the LPGA in another language. That’s exactly the effect Kobe Bryant had at the Olympics, when he gave interviews in Spanish and Italian. He’s not just a basketball star, he’s a worldwide ambassador for the NBA who sells more jerseys in China than Yao Ming.

If Libba Galloway is sincere about helping players’ professional development, making them all bilingual would be a fairer, better way to grow the tour.

Geor/Gia on My Mind

Yesterday in the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres argued that “Citizenship Flexibility at the Olympics Is a Good Thing,” because that’s the only way that all of the best athletes would compete at the Olympics. And there’s a certain logic behind the notion:

Ayres writes, “The country quota system keeps many of the best athletes home. If I were the fifth-best back-stroker in the world, I’d be upset that I couldn’t compete because of when I was born.” Now, before you start drafting that mock-touching epic about the sad life of the world’s fifth-best back-stroker (Possible titles: “On My Back and Screwed”? “I Stroked and Got the Shaft”?) , consider that in in the US Olympic trials, it’s often harder to make the team than it is to make it to the Olympic finals.

Ayres considers, then dismisses, team sports as a counterargument. What he wants to argue is this:

The beginnings of a new trend are indirectly pushing us toward more meritocratic and less nation-centric Olympics. Citizenship is becoming more fluid for Olympic athletes and it’s improving the quality of competition at the games in both individual and team events.

I agree — sort of. Definitely, you get a higher-caliber event if all the best athletes are in it. But it I kept thinking that in another way, the fans are getting cheated. See, the fans are going to root for someone, which is an emotional response. And if there’s “a free market for Olympic citizenship,” as Ayres would have it, we’d have every event be like table tennis, where most of the field are either Chinese citizens or Chinese emigres.

In fact, doing away with the notion of nations would also do away with the absurd notion of a medal count, too. And you wouldn’t have outrageous events like the controversy in the men’s basketball final at the 1972 Olympics, when the officials awarded the Soviets a second chance to score a winning basket, or the case of light middleweight boxer Roy Jones Jr., who outlanded his South Korean opponent, Park Si-Hun 86-32 in the finals at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea, and still “lost” the fight in a split decision. (Korean officials wined and dined the three officials who awarded the bout to Park.)

But doing away with country identities would also do away with all those incredibly poignant stories about an athlete’s success at a country bringing joy to it. And it would do away with a huge motivation for the athletes and the fans.

Consider something like the PGA Tour, where international golfers (Ernie Els from South Africa, Vijay Singh from Fiji, Mike Weir from Canada, Padraig Harrington from Ireland) tee it up with a bunch of Americans. Rooting for the individuals is OK, and the level of competition is high.

Now consider the difference professional golfers feel between competing in the Ryder Cup and competing in the the Buick Open, or in the difference in fan enthusiasm.

But then then this morning I was watching the bronze-medal match in men’s beach volleyball, when the perfect counter-argument to Ayres appeared on my telly. One team was from Brazil. The other was also from Brazil, only they were competing for Georgia. Georgia offered them citizenship in 2006, with one stipulation: that they adopt noms de jeu.

What are the two names? Why, Geor and Gia, of course. Now put them together: Geor/Gia. Get it? Geor-Gia … “Georgia.”

No, I’m not making this up. I couldn’t; it’s too bizarre. If you don’t believe me, look at the photo at the top of the blog post. That’s Geor, puttin’ up a block, with his XFL-style stage name on his jersey.

So we’re left with a quandary: Either we have the absurdity of countries fielding crappy national teams in some events (the Onion story, “Netherlands Taught How To Play Softball Seconds Before Being Shoved Onto Field Against U.S. Team,” lands this one for a perfect 10), or we have ridiculous “national teams” like Geor/Gia.

Come to think of it, either way you can’t lose. God, I love the Olympics.

Measuring the Olympics

Since the Olympics started, I’ve been interested in all the meta-scoring: that is, the “alternative” looks at the results. For example, Braniac has a story today called “The Pyramid Theory of Sports,” which offers a new slant on whether Michael Phelps is the greatest athlete of all time. The blogger, Christopher Shea, argues for a pyramid theory:

The pyramid in question is demographic. The base represents the number of people who have ever tried the sport, usually as children, while at the peak, naturally, stand the top achievers. The broader the pyramid base, the greater the athletes at the top, all other things being equal. The vetting process is simply far more severe.

Thus, Phelps is overrated “because, as a result of geography, the scarcity of pools, and cultural preference, relatively few children worldwide get a taste of serious swimming, let alone competitive swimming.”

On the other hand, a basketball or soccer star is at the top of a very big heap. Another interesting application of this (which Shea didn’t delve into) would be using the relative size of “pyramids” to compare athletes across time. For example, how good was Jim Thorpe, relative to the pyramid size of people in those sports as the same time as him?

Slate magazine is interested in the sappiness of NBC’s Olympics coverage, which is why they’re running The Olympics Sap-o-Meter.

After slogging through Olympic broadcasts of yore, we drew up a list of 33 syrupy words that NBC has chronically overused: adversity, battled, cancer, challenges, courage, cry, death, dedication, determination, dream, emotion, glory, golden, hardship, heart, hero, inspiration, inspire, journey, magic, memory, miracle, mom, mother, Olympic-sized, overcome, passion, proud, sacrifice, spirit, tears, tragedy, triumph. While these 33 words are by no means an unabridged collection of schmaltzy nouns, adjectives, and verbs, they’re a good sampling of NBC’s bathos. Think of them as the Dow Jones of sap.

Good idea! Comes with a handy bar graph (see the sappiest day), the sappiest line of the day, and even a Sapo-Meter Tag Cloud. I especially like this, because NBC’s prime-time coverage is syrup-coated. But if you wander over to MSNBC or USA, you get event coverage.

Imagine, events where the US is not a medal contender! Or even — the horror! — not in the event at all! I know I lack patriotism for saying it, but I find unsyruped event coverage (you know? just of some interesting sport people are quite good at?) quite refreshing.

In a blog called Fourth Place Medal, Yahoo blogger Chris Chase takes issue with events that are judged. Having seen the bizarre way the gynmastics judges broke a tie to give a medal to the Chinese gynmast last night, I have to say it’s worth taking a look at. Chase re-tallies the Olympics medal count by tossing out some of the judged events, an attempt to “tally medals won in sports decided on the field of play, not by a judge in a teal blazer.”

An interesting idea, but it would have been better if s/he ran the before and after medal counts (only the after is on the blog). And I’m not just saying that because I’m envious of the 6394 comments on the post!

An LA Times Olympics blog is also recounting the hardware, arguing that the “true” Olympic gauge is medals per capita, which is just dividing the national population by the number of total medals. By that token, the MPC table comes out like this:

1. Australia (5 medals) – 4,120,171
2. Croatia (1 medal) – 4,491,543
3. Georgia (1 medal) – 4,630,841
4. Czech Republic (2 medals) – 5,110,456
5. The Netherlands (3 medals) – 5,548,438
6. Cuba (2 medals) – 5,711,976
7. North Korea (4 medals) – 5,869,772
8. South Korea (8 medals) – 6,154,106
9. Italy (8 medals) – 7,268,165
10. Azerbaijan (1 medal) – 8,177,717

That’s an interesting approach, but it ignores a huge factor in Olympic success: wealth. The New York Times ran a really interesting op-ed piece titled “Our Idea of Gold,” which made an argument I agree with:

But with the federal budget deep in the red, the economy in the doldrums, a broken military in need of repair, and enormous unmet domestic needs, we can think of a lot better places to invest federal resources than in building a sports machine. Let some rich benefactors augment the $130-million-a-year budget of the United States Olympic Committee. … If we are looking to invest in sports, we would be wiser to spend money on daily gym classes and after-school athletic programs.

After the Athens games in 2004, Conde Nast Portfolio picked up the wealth baton and did a little math with it. By dividing a country’s medal tally by its gross domestic product, they argue that “the numbers rearrange themselves dramatically.”

The graphic on their site has a cool mouse-over feature, showing that some countries with small GDPs do quite well (the new top five: Ethiopia, Georgia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Ukraine).

I’ve never liked the medal count. I think it diminishes the Olympics by skewing it towards winning and national supremacy. The Wall St. Journal ran an interesting piece yesterday, “The Glory of Just Showing Up,” which points out that “among the 222 countries that have sent athletes to the modern Games since 1896, only 130 have brought a medal home.” The rest are there just for the games. While the Journal is a bit dismissive of these other competitors (“What’s billed as a meet for the fittest in truth has a second division of schlumps”), they also mention the medals per capita and medals/GDP figures.

But it also dipped its toe into another interesting issue. When describing the issues in his country (the Maldives), Adam Mohamed noted that swimmers in his country have nowhere to train but the sea, and “there has been land allocated for a pool since 1988. It’s drawings, drawings, drawings.”

In other words, many countries just aren’t rich enough for their own facilities. So they export their athletes. That’s why, if you were watching the swimming coverage, you would have seen Kristy Coventry competing for Zimbabwe, despite swimming collegiately for Auburn, or Oussama Mellouli winning Tunisia’s first swimming gold medal, despite swimming for USC, or dozens of track athletes this week who had scholarships at US schools.

I haven’t seen a metric to account for that one, though.

Spooky-Cool Feature from NY Times & LinkedIn

So there I was whangling through the NY Times online yesterday, when mine eyes were arrested by this-a-here box:

Now, I’m not an engineer, but I work for an engineering company (which is indicated in my LinkedIn profile). Thus, my NY Times profile talked to my LinkedIn profile, and now my Web page has a special box where I get customized news … sort of. I say “sort of” because this morning I can’t actually find that box anywhere on the site!

Anyhow, it’s a bit spooky … if the Times and LinkedIn can knit that information together, God only knows what the NSA can do. But it’s also cool, because one of the things I follow in the course of my job is what’s happening in the engineering industry. Now, it would be even cooler if I could access it when I wanted. But maybe that happens when the widget gets out of beta.

The Problem with Indoor Volleyball

I’ve been somewhat quiet lately, because I’ve been gorging on the Olympics. But the coverage of indoor volleyball continues to bug me.

For some reason, TV coverage consistently shoots volleyball action this way:

True, the horizontal court is visible on your horizontal TV screen, but if you want to see the interesting stuff, you’re out of luck. From this shot all we can see who’s hitting, and how far the ball is away from the net.

Now check two views from different angles:

An end or angle view let’s you see where the hitter is relative to the block, what the block looks like, how high the hitter is hitting, and where the hitter is hitting (around the block? over it? through it?).

The most interesting part of indoor volleyball is what’s happening at the net, not the back court. But it’s shot at the worst possible angle to see it!

When you shoot video from either angle, the set moves laterally, the block moves laterally, and the defense re-forms behind the block. You get to see the block form, the hitter hitting around the block … it’s much, much better.

Maybe after the Olympics I’ll apply to be a director for NBC Sports. Anyone have a contact there?

Sustainability for kids

Three interesting kid-related studies all appeared in the news recently.

An article in the Hindustan Times writes up a study from Australia that found an association between high levels of outdoor activity and low rates of short-sightedness (i.e., myopia) in children, “irrespective of how much near work, such as reading, the children did.” I think they said the flip-side was true, too: too much indoor time, more myopia.

An article in the Guardian describes a major study by Play England, part of the UK National Children’s Bureau, arguing that children aren’t playing outside and taking enough risks:

‘Risk-taking increases the resilience of children,’ said one [play provider]. ‘It helps them make judgments,’ said another. Some of those interviewed blamed the ‘cotton wool’ culture for the fact that today’s children were playing it too safe, while others pointed to a lack of equipment or too much concrete in place of grass.

The Times (UK) examines new research into “How your behaviour can change your children’s DNA.” The science of epigenetics suggests that the recent surge in diseases such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease is partly linked to the lifestyles of past generations, and quotes one scientist as saying, “The evidence is increasingly that environmental factors like diet or stress can affect organisms in ways that are transmitted to offspring without any changes to DNA.”

In other words, increased age and unhealthy living tarnishes your DNA, whether you’re a man or a woman. Also, y’know, another quiet little reason not to pollute the hell out of the world.

The Wind-Up, and the Pitch …

I spent the weekend at the Willamette Writers conference, which was a most excellent good thing, though it has little to do with used cars. If you’re a writer and you’re anywhere near Portland Oregon the first weekend in August next year or in years hence, you ought to go. (I’ll delve more into that in a later post.)

I should back up and say I spent Thursday night at the conference, too, since I went to watch pitch practice. Pitching is the fine art of selling your book or screenplay idea to an agent or editor or publisher — verbally, in person.

In the world of publishing, 99.something percent of selling from author to agent (or ed. or pub.) doesn’t work this way. Instead it functions via the query letter, a one-page letter intended to both describe and inspire interest in your project, and say a little about yourself (answering the subtextual question, “why I am the perfect person on this earth to write this book”).

Queries are an art form in themselves, and writing one is an excellent way to figure out whether what you’ve written has a coherent plot (or not). Even if your plot hangs together, queries aren’t easy; they’re actually so bedeviling, there are entire books and blogs (Miss Snark and Query Shark) devoted to the subject. The best way to think of them is like the copy on the back cover of a book. Does it describe the story and get you interested? Does it give you an idea what it’s about, but not give away the ending? Did you buy the book as a result? Then it’s a winner.

The pitch is different, because it adds the exciting and dangerous prospect of … fear! After all, if you write a crap query, you’ll get a rejection letter. Disappointing as that is, you are spared the humiliation of sounding incoherent and stupid while describing your book — the same book you’ve slaved over, poured your heart into, agonized over for months or years — to a stranger.

On Thursday that’s just what I saw. These people stood up and stammered out a description of their book in front of a panel of four agents and a room of eighty people. Such bravery!

Saturday morning it was my turn. I had a pretty well-grooved pitch, thanks to practice, and a helpful book called “Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read.” Oh, and having done this before. Experience helps.

That said, my first pitch had the distinct, smoky aroma of crashing and burning. Part of it was because the agent wanted to know about me before asking about my project, so I ended up explaining weird biographical details, and then explaining why I was explaining them, which meant my carefully crafted message about the book, its positioning, story, hook, and themes were all scattered like wreckage on the table between us. He said he was going to pass on the project, since it sounded “too quiet.”

I sat for a moment, quietly gnashing my teeth, frustrated that because of our messed-up miscommunication, I hadn’t been able to get to describe the non-quiet parts of my pitch. Well hell.

Things got better, slowly. The next agent I pitched asked for a partial. The agent after that passed, but her pass I could live with. She said my pitch was fine, she just didn’t care for sports books in general, and golf books in particular.

Because my Saturday was all carved up with pitches, I didn’t spend much time going to the workshops. Instead I spent time hanging out and talking to people. And what did we talk about? I asked people about their projects. and naturally, people want to know what I was working on, too. So, I told them. And you know what? It sounds just like a pitch.

It sounds like a pitch because the only difference is that at the end, you’re not trying to close the deal. Want to get better at pitching? Then describe your project in casual conversation as many times as you can. Here’s the script:

Person you’ve just met: “What are you working on?

You: “I’m working on …” [and off you go, giving a short description that makes it sound interesting, and makes them want to read it.]

I explained my project at least five other times on Saturday alone. And I noticed that as the day progressed, my pitch kept getting better. More organized, more articulate, and I was able to make all the points I wanted. I had pitches at 10:30, 2:15, 3:30, 4:00, and 4:30, and I snuck in two with people I hadn’t been able to schedule. By the last one I was one well-trained pitch-monkey. I pitched the book seven times on Saturday, making me the Herbert R. Tarlek of publishing, missing only the white shoes and white belt.

True, this is all very unnatural. But ultimately I think it’s for the better. Yes, it’s more work. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, you’re going to get rejected. Right to your face.

But y’know what? That’s what makes you an author instead of just a writer. You’ve got to believe your stuff is that good, even if not everyone else does.

That said, I am now going back to revise my manuscript …