It’s easy to forget, in our modern world of globalized food supply-chains that oranges are native to tropical climates (along with most fruits). A long time ago, before the world was connected in the way it is now, it was difficult to transport oranges from tropical climates all the way to temperate climates before the fruit spoiled. Nowadays with lower transportation costs, as well as refrigeration, most people don’t think twice about buying oranges, even as far north a place as Denmark, where I will be spending this Christmas.

My meandering thoughts on oranges have caused me to reflect on the state of the modern world, and the culture that has evolved with it. If you transported an average family from the turn of the century into today’s world, they would be flabbergasted with what our modern technology enables us to do. Sure, by about 1900 globalization was effectively in place, but only a very small portion of the population was able to enjoy its spoils – tea and silk from Shanghai, and rugs from Rajasthan. Most of the world’s population was only beginning to feel the effects of industrialization – in particular, industrialized food production leading to more stable food supply.

My point, is that we take much of these advances in science and technology for granted. Theater workers (in Australia at least) still say “chookas” to each other, because before the advent of refrigeration, the humble chicken was a delicacy and could only be afforded if one was playing to a full house. Not only do we take technology for granted, we place no importance on the understanding of the underpinnings of how it came about, or indeed how it works.

This is a problem. Without an understanding of where our food comes from, people won’t understand our limitations in terms of how we interact with our environment. People forget how much transportation is involved with bringing us food, and thus fail to make the connection between energy prices and food supply. People don’t understand how truly urgent the problem of climate change is.

This holiday season, while we all indulge ourselves in what is hopefully very good food, I hope we spare a thought for the story behind it. I was very impressed with the clarity with which the story of stuff project presented the impacts of modern manufacturing processes. Perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant-future, someone can do the same with the story of food. After all, not only does everyone need stuff, everyone needs food. Moreover, without stuff… we’re just poor people, but without food – we’re dead.

I hope everybody enjoys their festive season. I also hope everyone takes the time to appreciate their food, especially those oranges.

This highlights a point that I keep coming back to in discussions about technique. A car’s tires are its sole interface with the ground. Everything that the car does in relation to making it move has to go through those tires. At a defensive driving course that I did once, the point was made over and over again that putting the best tires that you can afford on your car (and having the correct tire pressure) was the most effective way to make your car safer. And so is the case in running, as well as speed skating that the point at which ALL technical analysis must begin is the point where your foot, or your blade (in the case of speed skating) comes in contact with the ground.

The reason I say this is that, in my new role as a coach, I have had a chance to interact with a lot of other coaches and hear a lot of opinions on things related to elite sports performance. I’ve been an elite athlete long enough to know that very good coaches are extremely rare, although I did expect a slightly higher standard. What I am really trying to say is that I have heard a great deal of nonsense.

Even after a lifetime of experience, no coach can be “perfect”, and that is the rub.

Of course, nobody can or should expect a coach to be “perfect” right out of the box, nor should anyone expect such perfection after many years. Even after a lifetime of experience, no coach can be “perfect”, and that is the rub. An ideal coach’s attitude (as it should be for an athlete) is to always be improving, and to always seek it out. Now if everyone in the world were genetically identical, then it is conceivable that such perfection could be attainable, at least in theory. But people are not identical, conditions are different everywhere, and sports themselves evolve over time.

World records should be evidence enough of this. Take a sport like running – humans have been running for millions of years, our bodies are designed to do it. People have been competing in running races for at least a few thousand years (possibly more), yet world records are still being broken. Why? There are always very small refinements in technique, as well as technology, such as the clothes and shoes that runners wear. There are also constant developments in training methodology, and the pool of eligible athletes is always expanding.

The sum of all those complex parts is a gradual improvement in the overall standard of the sport, and an indicator of that is the fall of world records. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it angers me when I hear a coach say something along the lines of “if you want to do this time, then this is what you need to do” where “this” is usually a very specific set of instructions and technique where the athlete is basically a machine simply in need of having certain buttons pressed.

I like to take a more first-principles approach to coaching. Luckily there has been a lot of good research on the subject which allows me to stand on the shoulders of giants. It still surprises me how much the literature obviously isn’t being used by everyone. More esoteric still is the approach to technique.

Running is pretty much the only sport where you can tell an athlete to “just run a lot and what you feel to be the best technique will be it” and expect good results. Even then, most runners can benefit from small adjustments to their running technique, especially sprinters. This is because running is a very natural thing to do, and evolution has tuned our bodies quite well to do it. Just about every other sport must come up with what is necessarily “artificial” technique.

Strangely enough, the history of technique development in most sports indicates that the approach described above for running has been the one applied. Technique development has been a haphazard mix of trial-and-error (mostly error), and chance innovation, usually by sportspeople who train in isolation, or who come from other sports.That doesn’t mean that every sport other than running has rubbish technique, far from it. Those who have innovated have usually been the very best elite athletes, and they have often been very coordinated and possessed good natural biomechanics, which allows them to better feel when their own bodies are acting efficiently or not.

However, many example exist where technique has taken a very sudden leap forward because someone, usually a coach, stopped for a moment and thought about a movement, and how it could be different. The Fosbury Flop is a good example – there’s no way anyone decides that jumping backwards over a pole is a natural way to jump high, but Dick Fosbury realized that the arching of the back allowed a high jumper’s center of mass to be lower than the bar as it was being jumped over. Planting the front foot in a discus throw to get a little extra speed from the “whip” at the end of the spin, and kicking the front foot prior to throwing a javelin in order to take advantage of tendon-tension across the front of the body are two more subtle examples of deliberate technique development which yielded results.

there’s no way anyone decides that jumping backwards over a pole is a natural way to jump high

Not surprisingly now, I turn my attention to speed skating technique. I previously did a preliminary breakdown of skating technique in an attempt to understand the differences between ice and inline skating technique. In that article I concluded that the main reason that differences existed was because of the differences in the way ice blades and inline wheels behave when subjected to changes in force, and changes in angle (relative to the ground).

So you have these points on the ground. Actually they’re curvy lines and they aren’t very big. They provide lateral resistance and are effectively frictionless along their direction of motion. We push against these points in order to move forwards. We begin by simply pushing against them while they’re not moving (i.e. in a standing start), but doing this limits our speed to how fast our muscles can move. Then we start to use the lateral resistance and directional flow, but even this has limitations. Eventually, we use the curve of the blade to generate centrifugal force to give us extra force in our push. This is discussed in a previous post to some extent.

But what are those forces? Perhaps more importantly, what forces are required? Well, anecdotally, since us speedskaters are always being told to feel for “pressure” in the push (that pressure is the angular acceleration perpendicular to the direction of motion of a blade describing a curve on the ice) I will use the most obvious place where we find this “pressure” to come up with a suitable starting number – the corner. The corner radius in a long track is anywhere between 25m and 31m depending on which track you’re skating on, and which lane you’re in. Unsurprisingly, maximum pressure is found in a corner of the smallest radius, so we’ll take 25m.

Next we need some speed. The fastest skaters can skate a lap of a 400m oval in about 24 seconds, which comes to 60km/h or m/s. The cornering force that the skater must overcome is given by:

a skater skating a 24 second lap would be pulling 1.13 ‘g’s around the inner corner

This gives F to be 11.1ish (actually ) multiplied by the skater’s mass in kilograms. Just to give you a sense of scale for these forces, the force of gravity is about 9.8N per Kg of mass, so a skater skating a 24 second lap would be pulling 1.13 ‘g’s around the inner corner. Just for reference, you have to skate a 25.55 second lap to be pulling exactly 1g. This is significant because the lean you need to get in a corner to overcome a 1g cornering force is exactly 45 degrees.

As you can see, 45 degrees is actually quite a steep lean, and a 24 second lap would require even more. Just how much more is a matter of  remembering our sine and cosine rules.

Why is determining the angle important? Because it allows us to calculate the forces acting on the skater. We already have the force of gravity (9.8N) and and the centrifugal force (11.1N), but as you can see from the diagram, a skater doesn’t push directly down, or directly to the outside of the corner. A skater necessarily pushes along a line from the point of the center of mass to the point where the blade comes into contact with the ice, and this is where that angle becomes important. For the 25.55 second lap, when the cornering force and the force of gravity are equal (and the angle is 45 degrees) we simply add and which is about 13.86N per kilogram of bodyweight. When we go a little faster  we have to add and which comes to 14.52N per kilogram of bodyweight.

In other words, that extra 1.55 seconds of speed is worth just short of one extra newton of cornering force per kilogram of bodyweight. If you weigh 70kg, then that’s the difference between 970.2 newtons (the equivalent of lifting 100kg) of cornering force and 1016.4 newtons (the equivalent of lifting 104kg). Not forgetting, of course, that you’re doing this “lifting” with one leg while balanced on a sliver of metal 1.1mm thick, and travelling at 60km an hour. I’m sure anyone who’s ever done a 1-rep max test can tell you how much difference just a few kilograms can make when you’re right on the limit.

don’t forget that you’re doing this “lifting” with one leg while balanced on a sliver of metal 1.1mm thick, and travelling at 60km an hour

Of course, this is not the whole story, it is only the starting point. This is only a force requirement. Ultimately, we would like to calculate the “work” requirement (force distance), and the “power” requirement (the rate of work, or more precisely ). If you’ve been paying attention, you will realize that the force requirement says nothing about movement (which is, sadly, a rather inescapable element of speed skating). I weigh 72kg, so 14.52N per kilogram of bodymass is equivalent to the force that a 107kg weight would exert on me. I’m pretty sure I can’t do a 107kg one-legged-squat, but if I stand up straight, I can probably hold much more weight. Of course, if I skated with my legs straight, or close to it, I wouldn’t go very fast because there are other forces to overcome than cornering forces.

There is also air resistance. I covered this aspect of the sport briefly in this post, mostly to highlight what I perceived to be incorrect decisions regarding selection, which were impacted by not taking into account the importance of the altitude at which times were skated. In short, altitude makes a difference to air resistance, and air resistance is such a significant factor in speed skating (some say as high as 80%) that even small difference in air resistance can have a measurable impact on times. In that previous post, I introduced this equation:

is the force, is the air density is velocity is area is drag coefficient and is a direction vector for the velocity. Using some fairly simple mathematics, I was able to show that going from sea level to 1400m (the elevation of the Utah Olympic Oval) reduces aerodynamic drag by about 15%. I say “simple” because at no point did I actually have to calculate the force, I only needed to calculate the difference between two forces. But now that we are trying to calculate force requirements, it is time to get our hands dirty.

I thought a skier was a reasonably good aerodynamic approximation to a speed skater so I used their wind tunnel data

Let us begin at a typical indoor oval at sea level with favourable conditions of about 5 degrees ambient temperature. The air density would be 1.269kg per cubic meter. For velocity, we’ll take our 24 second lap (60km/h), for frontal area I’ve ripped off some approximate numbers from journal articles that variously discuss skiers and cyclists who have gone through the trouble of wind tunnel testing. For frontal area, I’m using 0.45 square meters, and for drag coefficient I’m going to use 0.6. When you plug all these numbers into the formula you get 47.59N. That may not seem like much, but when you consider that it is the force required simply to stay at a constant speed, it is significant. Look at it another way, in a frictionless vacuum, 47.59N of constant force would push a 72kg mass (me) in a straight line to 60km/h in just over 25 seconds and do it in just over 200m.

Which brings me nicely to my final point of this post (which seems to have ballooned out into something much bigger than I anticipated). The force required for a skater to actually accelerate. Without exception, all individual skating distances begin with a standing start. So far this analysis has only looked at the forces required to maintain a speed of roughly 60km/h (which is certainly at the high end of what is currently possible in the skating world). Getting there is another matter entirely.

all skating distances begin with a standing start – this analysis has only looked at forces required to maintain speed – getting there is another matter entirely

When calculating the acceleration required, we encounter a strange dilemma. The very best sprinters in the world can skate a standing 100m in about 9.5 seconds. We’ll round up to 10. Assuming constant acceleration over that 10 seconds (which would carry the requirement of the least amount of force), a skater would have to accelerate at 2 meters per second, per second (i.e. at the end of the first second, they would be traveling at 2m/s, at the end of the second second, the would be traveling at 4m/s etc.) This gives exactly 10 seconds for 100m, and the force required to achieve this is exactly 2m (so for a 72kg mass, a force of 144N is required (which is the same force as a 14.7kg mass exerts due to gravity). This doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you realize that acceleration isn’t constant because, for reasons explained above and in previous articles, there are technical limitations. Also, a 2 meter per second per second constant acceleration leaves you traveling at 20 meters per second (72km/h), well above the top speed of any skater.

Luckily, we have an easy way out of this. We know that our 60km/h-capable skater can exert a force of 14.52N per kg of body mass which is the same as saying that our skater apply force to accelerate at 14.52 meters per second per second which can take us up to 16.6 meters per second in well under two seconds, and since you only have to travel at 16 meters per second for 6.25 seconds to cover 100m, we have easily solved our original dilemma, and are now left with the question of why standing 100m splits are so slow, given that fast skaters can apply so much force. After all, if you can accelerate at 14.52 meters per second per second, it takes you 1.15 seconds to reach 60km/h. Assuming this is your top speed, you would only have to skate at this speed for another 5.7 seconds to cover 100m – that’s a standing 100m in 6.85 seconds!

so many things are wrong with this graph!

Obviously the curves are much smoother, and the fact that force isn’t the only variable to consider comes into play. Remember that our figure of 14.52 is the force required to keep everything in balance at a certain speed, as soon as your body moves, the numbers will be different because there are physical limitations to the rate of work you can do (power), and even if there weren’t there are physical limitations to how fast you can move parts of your body.

Ultimately, the answer lies in biomechanics, which I hope to cover in a later post.

Continuing from where the previous post “left off”, the weekend right after Enschede, I found myself in Inzell, Germany coaching and preparing for the ESDP training camp. (The ESDP is the East Scandinavian Development Project – a partnership between Sweden, Finland and Denmark to pool resources and develop our junior skaters). There were some races and some pretty HUGE personal bests by many members of the team. All in all, a total of 4:49.37 worth of PBs were attained, which averages out to about 36 seconds per skater. In my entire ice skating career, I think I’ve taken a total of about 15 seconds off all my PBs, so these kids are doing very well.

As you would expect, I took a lot of video during this training camp, and I present some of it here, enjoy.

Thinking about this further, one can’t help but be struck by the peculiarity of the situation. An Australian who has only been ice skating for three years is given the task of teaching Danish juniors to skate. Of course, anyone who has been following this website will also know that I used to be an inline skater, and was part of the Australian “program” which took a bunch of inline skaters and trained them for the Olympics. In 16 months, one out of five of us made it to the games, a seemingly impossible proposition at the start of the journey. Since all of the Danish skaters are originally inline skaters, my particular experience is more valuable than say, someone who has been ice skating all their lives.

So recently we have been doing some short track skating to help the skaters with cornering technique as well as ice feel, and it has been going very well. More recently, we had our first long track training camp. For this, we went to holland, and coincidentally ended up at the very ice skating rink where I first learned how to ice skate (strictly speaking, the first long track I ever skated on was Dronten, but I only went for a week, and I was in the middle of a backpacking trip). So over the course of a long weekend, I attempted to work my magic on a small squad of talented inline skaters to try and make them good ice skaters.

In my characteristic style, I took some video. Not just for technique analysis (although there was plenty of that) but also to document what happened, to have the memories, and just for a bit of fun. I present the video here:

Last Friday I was fortunate enough to be present at my girlfriend’s Ph.D. thesis defence at the University of Copenhagen. In case anyone is wondering, it went very well, and all the opponents spoke highly of her work, and now we can all call her “Doctor”. I have incidentally included a small photo gallery from the day of the defence at the bottom of this post. However, what I really want to talk about is the subject matter of the thesis itself.

As you may have guessed from the title, the thesis is concerned with fluorinated compounds. The full name of the thesis is Polyfluorinated surfactants in food packaging of paper and board. The research investigates the implications of fluorinated compounds when they are used in food packaging. After the high-profile banning of BPA from water bottles, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to come up with ways in which other chemicals in food packaging might have adverse effects.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have had the privilege of reading through the thesis many times, at various stages of its development. It is written in English, and being a native English speaker, I have some amount of usefulness in spotting odd uses of grammar, and finding better choices of words in certain situations. To be honest, I didn’t have to correct very much. Most Danes speak English quite fluently, and unsurprisingly, Danes who have been in educational institutions for long enough to get a PhD speak and write better English than many of my Australian friends for whom English is their ONLY language. (I also drew the molecules for her thesis, including the cover image above).

Anyway, while many (indeed most) of the more technical points of chemistry went straight over my head, I was able to quite easily follow what was going on in the thesis, and I write about it here not only because I find it interesting, but also because I find it concerning from a public health perspective.

So what are fluorinated compounds? They are chemicals with the chemical element fluorine in them. The ones being investigated are ones that have long chains of CF2, that is a carbon atom with two fluorines attached. The carbon acts as a backbone while the fluorine attaches to the outside (they’re the orange blobs in the drawing above, the carbons are black). They’re very useful because the bonds don’t break down easily, and they have the property of being both hydrophobic and lipophobic, which means that they repel both water-based solutions as well as oil-based solutions. Teflon (polytetrofluoroethylene) is a good example of a commonly used fluorinated compound.

Imagine a popcorn bag. In the past, simple popcorn bags were coated with wax so that the paper in the bag wouldn’t degrade too quickly after coming into contact with the butter in the popcorn. This was all well and good until we invented microwave popcorn. Regular wax breaks down in a microwave, so you have to coat the inside of the bag with something that will withstand the heat, and this is where materials like fluorinated compounds come in.

So what’s the problem? As mentioned above, they are useful because the carbon-fluorine bonds are strong and don’t break down easily. It is also for precisely this reason that these compounds accumulate in nature. It gets worse though, these compounds are bioaccumulative – they accumulate in living organisms. It was at this point where I was surprised to learn that most people living in the western world live with significant amounts of chemicals and plastics in their bodies that have slowly accumulated over time.

Many of these substances are mostly harmless, but the long-term effects of most of them are unknown. There is mounting evidence now that fluorinated compounds fall into the category of being endocrine disruptors, meaning that (like BPA) they can disrupt your hormones. That has a number of bad effects, notable among them being lower sperm counts (leading to infertility) as well as babies being born with underdeveloped genitalia.

So this was the crux of the thesis – do fluorinated compounds used in food packaging contaminate our food? It turns out that finding an answer to this question requires some impressive instrumental trickery and knowledge of chemistry. I used to think that you just put a bunch of samples through a very large and expensive machine and then it would tell you if what you were looking for was there, and how much there was. Turns out that there’s quite a lot more to it.

The short answer is yes. In most cases, there was significant migration (that’s what they call it) of these compounds from the packaging to the food. We should all be concerned. Since this result would be considered quite recent, there has not been sufficient time to develop and implement regulations on fluorinated compounds in food packaging materials. In the meantime, we should make an attempt to avoid exposure to them wherever possible.

But how? First we have the droplet test. Since fluorinated compounds are very strong surfactants, they have a very high surface energy. This causes droplets on the surface to form into tight balls. In particular, pay close attention to the angle of contact between the droplet and the surface. In the diagram above, the droplet on the right would indicate that fluorinated compounds were being used.

The next test is called the “tear test”. Since these compounds are used to impregnate paper and (card)board, the materials can be torn. When the packaging material is torn, pay close attention to where the tear takes place. If there is a separation, that is – if there is one layer of paper and a separate layer of clear plastic, then there’s no need to worry about fluorinated compounds. In this case, you have a plastic coating, and plastics have been around for longer and have regulations in place. If, however, you find that there is no separation, then you most likely have yourself a fluorinated compound.

Don’t despair though, there are varying degrees of badness. The greatest amount of migration tends to occur when the packaging is used on wet, and especially greasy foods. Also of concern is when the content of the packaging is intended to be heated with the packaging still in contact with it (remember those bags of microwave popcorn). Thirdly, more flexible packaging materials, like thin paper, are worse because they require a higher amount of fluorinated compounds to effectively impregnate them. For reasons that should be obvious, the longer something is in contact with its fluorinated compound-impregnated packaging material, the worse you can expect it to be. Dried foods and frozen foods are often ok though.

So there you have it, advance notice on the next widely-used chemical that will probably eventually get banned. Just the tip of the iceberg in the slow chemical contamination of our biosphere. And now, as promised, photos from the day of the thesis defence (click the images for a larger view):

“Don’t call me that!” was the reply. “In fact, you can take out the G altogether,” he tacked on.

“But dude, without G I could only asp instead of gasp, rab instead of grab and oogle instead of–”

He paused to think for a moment

“Hmmm. . . maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Seen any good. . . sorry, ood movies recently?” he said quickly, trying to change the subject.

“Yeah, I saw something about codebreaking.”

“What was it called?”

“Umm, can’t remember. . . name a few movies.”

“Mercury Risin?”

“No.”

“Enima?”

“What?” he said, looking puzzled.

“Oh, enigma. . . sorry, took out the G. . . hahaha. . . ”

“You’re an idiot! No, it wasn’t that, it had something to do with a message from outer space.”

“Independence day?”

“No, the aliens were peaceful and the message was about building some kind of machine.”

“What did the machine do?”

“It transported people to–”

“Contact!” he cut him off.

“That’s it.”

“That’s not a movie about codebreaking.”

“Bollocks, the code was great, it was three dimensional and the key was in the code itself”

“Contained within the code? What a novel idea.”

“Oh my, look at the time, I’d better go now, what’s your number?”

“Ummm. . . here it is: 64, 127, 105, 197, 111, 76, 12, 181, 113, 3, 201, 30, 41, 109, 85.”

Recent events have caused me to reflect on things, one of those things is the death penalty. Those who’ve known me for a long time know that I’ve been a fairly active member of Amnesty International for a long time. Anyone who knows Amnesty’s work well will know that they are opposed to the death penalty. Does this mean that I am also opposed to the death penalty? As a matter of fact, I am, but it was by no means an automatic following of Amnesty stance that led me to oppose the death penalty.

In my younger days, I was considerably more conservative than I am now on certain things. I believed that if you were poor, it was probably because you were lazy, if you were in jail, you probably did something very bad, and if you were on death row, then you probably killed someone. Wait, that’s not quite true – go through that last sentence and take out all instances of the word “probably”.

In the bubble I grew up in, you had to be very lazy to be poor (and even then, poverty was not guaranteed). I didn’t even know anyone who went to jail, that was something that happened to other people. But those bubbles burst, and your horizons expand, and you realize that there’s a lot more to it than that. You eventually insert the word “probably” into those sentences, then you realize the implications of a world where not everything is clear-cut, black-and-white.

Consider the fallibility of the justice system. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend that it never happens. When I was in high school, I acted in a play called “Twelve Angry Men” which, you might have guessed, is about a jury deliberating on the innocence or guilt of a man accused of murder. Two films have been made of the play, but the superior of the two is the black-and-white 1957 version.¹ I encourage all of you to go watch it. The play begins with a vote of 11-1 in favour of “guilty”, and as the discussion develops, inconsistencies are found in the evidence, prejudices are found in the jurors, and slowly but surely reasonable doubt wins the day, and they vote for acquittal. This probably doesn’t happen every day, and I think part of the point of the play is to show how easy it is for a jury to make a wrong decision. The point is that it is not so hard to imagine that an innocent person might be convicted, even with the allowance of “reasonable doubt”.

these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”

The recent example of Troy Anthony Davis (pictured) is a good one. He was convicted of murder mostly because of eyewitness testimony. There was nothing else to link him to the murder. No murder weapon was ever found. Since the trial, seven out of nine eyewitnesses have either changed or recanted their testimony. Now, I don’t think he’s guilty, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”. In a flawed system, there is always a chance of punishing an innocent man, and the death penalty is irreversible.

How many innocent people are wrongfully punished? One for every ten guilty? Maybe one for every hundred? There probably is some ratio that society would deem to be “acceptable”, and I should hope that it is very high. However, when it comes to final and irreversible punishments, we could simply avoid it ever happening by abolishing the death penalty.

But what about the guilty ones? On the same day that Troy Davis was executed, another man named Lawrence Brewer was also put to death. His crime was the murder of a black man by chaining him to the back of a truck and dragging him until the body was so disfigured, that it was mistaken for road kill. In this case, he was convicted using DNA evidence which matched blood found on him to the blood of the victim. Surely people like this deserve to die?

Maybe they do, but it is not for us to decide. It is not the role of a state to kill people. The whole point of the law is to protect people, to guarantee our equality and freedom. Killing someone achieves none of those aims. Removing a dangerous individual from society can be accomplished just as easily with imprisonment. I believe the real reason we seem so keen on killing people is that we feel a need to satiate our desire for revenge. It is dangerous, and quite barbaric for a society to give into those feelings.

“…this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work”

Maybe the death penalty could act as a deterrent. If this was the case, we would see a significantly lower incidence of violent crime in places where the death penalty is practiced when compared to similar places where it is not. If I really wanted to believe in the death penalty, if I really wanted to ignore all the wishy-washy philosophical and moral arguments about why it is wrong for the state to kill people, and concentrate on the facts, then this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work.

Curiously, and counterintuitively enough, places that still practice the death penalty have a significantly higher incidence of violent crime than places that don’t. I don’t know why, but I can hazard a guess. If the state thinks it’s ok to kill people, then that sends a message to the population. People probably don’t even realize it on a conscious level, but the message probably goes something like “it’s ok to solve problems by killing people”. It certainly doesn’t act as a deterrent.

So we have a form of punishment that is irreversible, brutal, and final. There is always the chance that you accidentally punish someone who is innocent. In terms of protecting the rest of the population, it can be easily substituted. And to top it all off, it doesn’t even work as a deterrent. I understand that it used to be very common during medieval times (as was torture, but that’s another article), and maybe it worked back then, though I doubt it. It’s about time we pulled ourselves out of the dark ages and abolished this barbaric practice worldwide, once and for all, because it doesn’t belong here. We’ve gone to the moon, and we’ve sent probes to take our curiosity beyond the farthest reaches of our own solar system, yet we still have capital punishment… wtf mate?

Footnotes

The large square has a side length of 1. All of the lines within the square begin at the corners and end at the midpoint of an edge. The question is:

What is the area of the light-blue square?

(I realize that many of my maths friends have seen this before, try not to spoil it for everyone else)

I will write the answer and an explanation in the comments in a few days.

(actually, just scroll down for the solution (if you want to see it))

keep going

.

.

.

Solution:

so it turns out I can’t post pictures in the comments. So I present the solution here.

It helps to cut along the lines and try to rearrange things. We can cut out triangles from the original square and then reattach them as illustrated above.

If you repeat several times, you end up with the diagram above – five identical squares with the same area as the original square. So we can safely say that the square in the middle has an area one fifth of the original large square.

Stay tuned for more silly recreational mathematical goodness…

Ten years on, and I remember it well. I was at the Melbourne University gym when it happened, I had just finished doing weights and as I came out of the weights room into the main foyer, there was a small crowd gathered around the TV screens. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center” someone said, anticipating my query. I watched the live report for a short while, and as I was about to leave (it was about 11 at night) the second plane crashed into the south tower.

I didn’t know what to make of it. I quickly rushed home and flicked on the news. It didn’t seem to matter which channel I chose, as everyone seemed to be reporting on the same thing. This was a big deal, that much was clear. Details slowly began to emerge – two planes, three planes, no four planes, another one crashed into the Pentagon. It was all too much. At that moment, I was very glad that I was in Australia, quite literally on the other side of the world, and that I was far away from it all.

So it’s been 10 years since that day and much has changed, but have the changes been for the better? On the 12th of September, French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans). You would be hard-pressed to find a Frenchman agreeing with that sentiment now. The world seemed to change in some kind of profound way that day, it seemed to lose a bit of its innocence – of what innocence it had left.

It seems strange. Nearly 3000 people died that day, and that’s not a lot. Many more people die every day from hunger, disease, and civil conflict, so what’s the big deal? In our minds, this seems much worse, because it’s not just about the number, but the intent. All the other deaths seem less significant because they are the result of a system where people are, on some level, trying to do the right thing. Even people who die due to the criminal negligence of a dictator do so because, in some strange way, that dictator thinks what he is doing is “right”.

What makes the September 11 attacks significant is their intention – to terrorise. To paraphrase a quote from one of my favourite films, The Dark Knight – “some people just want to watch the world burn”. It is perhaps not quite so simple – the organisers of the attacks weren’t just destroying for destruction’s sake, they were trying to instil fear into a population, and in that aim they succeeded admirably. How do you deter someone who’s willing to die just to get to you? How do you disarm someone who uses ordinary commercial airplanes as weapons? How do you defend against fear?

Some ice hockey coaches say that the best form of defence is to attack. Sadly the principles of ice hockey don’t apply to international conflict situations, and here’s why: In ice hockey, both teams are evenly matched – they have the same equipment, the same number of players, and play by the same rules, and have the same criteria for victory – this is not true of terrorists. We on the one hand would like to stop them from killing innocent people, while they cry victory when we’re scared. So what is the best way to respond to terrorism? It certainly isn’t to attack and kill terrorists, as they seem not to mind death so much.

I suppose the only benefit that can possibly come from killing terrorists is that being dead makes it difficult to terrorize. The killing of Osama Bin Laden is certainly a blow to terrorism, but unless the root causes are addressed, the setback will only be temporary. Taking a few key players out of a hockey team might make them suck out loud for a while, but as long as players want to be good at hockey, the team will eventually come back. So what’s the key? How do we construct a world where people don’t want to be terrorists?

Think about it this way – if ice skating wasn’t fun, if manoeuvering a puck around with a stick wasn’t fun, and if scoring goals and winning games wasn’t fun, then nobody would want to play hockey. Luckily, the aim of terrorism is well-defined – to terrorise. Do something nasty like blowing up a bus, if people become scared and change their behaviour to reflect that, then you’ve won. Looking at it this way, the odds seem stacked in their favour. I mean, it’s not really very difficult to scare us, and here’s why:

Think of a lottery. I think people who buy lottery tickets are idiots because the chance of winning is so minuscule that your expected value (the probability of an event, multiplied by the value outcome of that event) is actually much, much, much lower than the value of your ticket. You may as well flush money down the toilet if you’re going to buy lottery tickets. But why do so many people buy lottery tickets? Because winning would be really great. We know this because it’s on TV, we see people winning lotteries and buying lots of cool stuff. Of course, if the TV actually showed us a representative sample of lottery participants, you would have maybe 10 years worth of shots of people saying “oh well, I didn’t win this time” for every minute of people saying “yes! I won the lottery”. But our minds don’t work like that anyway, we’ll only remember the exciting “winning” scenes and forget the rest.

Terrorism is like a reverse lottery. We see these two massive buildings collapse after airplanes fly into them, and all the chaos that ensues. We see photos of mangled buses. We see videos of people getting their heads sawn off. All pretty horrible stuff, and it scares us. But statistically, it shouldn’t. The probability of you succumbing to an act of terror is insignificant. You’re much more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident. But the images that stick in our heads are the high-impact, low-probability events… because that’s just how our minds work.¹

So not being scared would quickly take the wind out of the sails of would-be terrorists, but for many reasons this is difficult to do. We can try, of course, but we’re never going to get around the fact that images of innocent people being killed in horrible ways is going to make us scared that something similar might happen to us. Not reporting it might be a possibility, but I am of the view that that would be irresponsible journalism. Reporting it in such a way as to diminish its impact would also seem to me to be poor journalism, even though it would be preferable to the sensationalization that does sometimes grip the news/entertainment media in the relentless battle for TV ratings.

What else motivates terrorists? What in the world goes through someone’s head when they strap explosives to themselves and willingly commit their lives to the act of instilling fear in others? I believe it is hopelessness. The kind of hopelessness that is fed by extreme poverty and hunger. The kind of hopelessness that grows in the mind, not only of those who are marginalised by a particular society, but by a whole world who seems indifferent to their humanity.

Ask yourself: why wouldn’t I be a suicide bomber? Well, I have things to look forward to. I’m going skating tomorrow night, and I don’t want to miss out on that. I’ve got a good education, and with it good career prospects. I’m surrounded by people who care about me, who would probably miss me if I became a suicide bomber. Someday I might want to have kids and watch them grow up, and being a suicide bomber kind of puts an end to all that. I can make a positive difference in people’s lives, and I feel like I owe it to these people to stick around and not deny them that.

My guess is that the average suicide bomber probably doesn’t think most of those thoughts. The average suicide bomber probably doesn’t come from a wealthy background, or live in a wealthy country. The average suicide bomber probably isn’t terribly well-educated either. My guess is that there needs to be a very high degree of desperation in a person’s life for them to want to end it as a suicide bomber. Of course, this is not to say that the above is true for all terrorists. The organizers and financiers, who are often wealthy and educated, are often also far less willing to strap a bomb to themselves, instead leading others to do it.

Before we start to point fingers at Islam, we should remember that there are something like 1.5 billion Muslims in the world today, and the number of terrorists is far, far lower (think of those lottery tickets). Islam has simply been unfortunate enough to be the dominant religion in many of the places where terrorism germinates. Earlier in history, when abject poverty was far more evenly distributed around the world, Christians (during the crusades) also did very many very nasty things to non-christians, often quoting scripture as justification for it.

I’m sorry to say it, but the terrorists are winning. We’re scared of them. In many parts of the world, people are more concerned about terrorists than climate change (which, unlike a lottery ticket, will most definitely affect them). They say that they want to destroy western civilization, and we’re so scared that some of us have taken up arms. Some nut in Norway got so scared of Muslims that he went a killed a bunch of his own people. A handful of countries got so scared that they spent a great deal of money and human lives (many more than were lost when the twin towers fell) on invading two sovereign countries. These conflicts have exacerbated strains in international relations, and depleted the treasuries of countries who could really have used a bit more financial stability.

And for what?

A few heads on pikes. That’s all. The ill will that our war on terror has fed will fill the ranks of terrorist training camps for years to come. We would have been better off just taking three trillion dollars and distributing a thousand dollars to each of the poorest 3 billion people in the world. We would have lost a whole lot less lives, and founded a 3-billion-strong fan club of western civilization. Of course, I’m not a big fan of supply-side economics, or the kind of international aid that just gives people money, but it’s a sobering thought that so much money has been spent. Money that could have been spent a little more wisely.

So it’s been ten years since it happened. Those who perpetrated those cowardly acts are mostly dead now, which I suppose is a good thing. But the price has been great, too great. We’ve spent too much money, and lost too many lives. In doing so, we’ve also sown the seeds for more hate. We say that we’re fighting to preserve our way of life, but we should remember the values that our way of life is built upon. Our way of life isn’t just about shiny buildings, and public transport – it’s about ideas, and principles… those ideas and principles are invulnerable to bullets and bombs, or so we thought. If all it takes is a few collapsing buildings and exploding buses for us to abandon those principles, then the terrorists have already won.²

If we truly want to honour those who died in terrorist attacks, both on September 11 and elsewhere, then we should remember this. We must remember what it is that our way of life is built upon. We must not give in to fear. If the terrorists want to make martyrs of the cowards who perpetrate terrorist attacks then let us also give meaning to our own victims. Let their deaths not be in vain, but let their memory serve as a constant reminder that we are better than them. But to truly be better than them, then we must fight with our ideas, and not with our guns. That is how to honour the victims of 9/11

Footnotes

Nostalgia. Not for certain time, but for a certain kind of film making. J.J.Abrams has been criticized for making films very much like the “old” Steven Spielberg films, but I think that’s silly – those were very good films.

The premise is simple enough, a group of kids in a small town is shooting a film as part of a project then something happens – a train crash. The military becomes involved, mysterious events unfold, people start to go missing, and it all builds up predictably towards the climactic end sequences where all is revealed. Throw in an unlikely, and wounded hero, a little bit of teen-love, and some snappy dialogue and you’ve got yourself a movie. And loud noises, DON’T FORGET LOUD NOISES!

Although formulaic in almost every way imaginable, the predictability does not take away from the enjoyment of the film. Many other films bring all the right elements together, but still somehow don’t “work”, they don’t suspend the audience’s disbelief, and often fail to make that emotional connection that ties viewers to the characters in the film. This film works, and it works well.

In many ways it most closely resembled E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Since Star Trek, Abrams seems to have developed a liking for using lens-flare in many of his shots and this has become part of his signature style (something I’m sure his director of photography is annoyed about). He has also become quite proficient at using sudden, surprising, entries of “things” into the shot (along with loud noises) to jolt the viewer out of the comfort zone.

As mentioned before, the story is quite predictable, yet you still sit through the movie craving every new detail that dots the line from A to B. The film-within-a-film, is also used very effectively, not only as a plot device, but also to foreshadow the larger film itself. It is also worth waiting around during the end credits, as the film project the kids were working on (shot on Super 8 film, hence the name) is shown in its entirety.

Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney do a stellar job in the lead roles, and the supporting roles are also well-cast. In particular because none of the supporting actors, especially the adults, overshadow the kids. Towards the end, as all the loose ends are being tied up, some of the “resolutions” seem a little contrived. One also has to spend a significant part of the film getting over the minor technical detail of a small pickup truck derailing a train (although, for what it’s worth, the derailing scene is spectacular if overblown¹). There are also other minor factual errors which you wouldn’t notice, the appearance of a Sony Walkman (before its time) and the mention of a Rubik’s cube (also before its time) and these don’t detract at all from the watchability of the film.

Overall, a predictable yet exciting, spectacular, and emotionally-involving film experience. I give it four stars out of five.