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.

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):

First, we need to establish the basic tenets of skating technique.

The line of an ice blade or inline frame, with various forces drawn in

The above diagram is that of a left skate in the straight, viewed from above. The skate points slightly outwards from the center line and force is applied by the skater towards the left, perpendicular to the line of travel (often slightly towards the rear as well) indicated above by the blue arrow. The ground exerts an equal and opposite force in the opposite direction (as per Newton’s third law) but because of the way a skate limits the range of direction of motion (they like to go forwards or backwards along a straight line) it exerts a force back towards the skater (and balancing these forces is what keeps a skater upright when the point of contact with the ground is not directly below a skater’s center of mass). This force is indicated by the green line. These two forces mostly cancel each other out but not quite. Anyone who knows anything about vectors knows that if the blue and the green line aren’t exactly lined up, there will be a third force, indicated by the red line. This is the arrow that drives the skater forwards.

The observant readers will note that if you reduce the angle between the green and blue lines, the red line will be bigger. This can be achieved by turning the skate further away from the center line, and is what happens during the start of a race when the skater is accelerating. The tradeoff is that this kind of pushing cannot be maintained by a very long time because there is a limit to how long a skaters legs can be. The angle has to slowly come closer to being in line with the direction of motion as the skater gets faster.

Tracks on the ice at the start of a race

This is perhaps easier to understand with the above illustration. At the start, the skater is practically running with the skates pointing outwards, and as he gains speed, he has to point his skates more and more forward. Of course, this isn’t the whole story. Skates are designed to be able to turn, and it’s a good thing too because at the high speeds that elite skaters reach, both on the ice and on inlines, even a very slight angle outwards would quickly be unproductive in generating forward force. What eventually happens is the centrifugal/centripetal force generated when a skater turns is used

Diagram of the forces in the straight, superimposed on Joshua Lose

To re-use the convention from a previous diagram, this is how the tracks would look in the ice:

this is what the tracks would look like when a skater is up to speed

So if these general principles are true for both ice and inline skates, then why the huge difference in technique?

The first major difference in technique is easily explained. Ice skaters are generally lower than inline skaters. On the short track, this is because they experience greater cornering forces (with theoretically infinite grip, compared to the finite grip of inline wheels) so must lower their center of mass just to lean into the corner more effectively. On long track, it is because the speeds experienced are much higher, and the contribution of air resistance to drag is greater. In addition, on the ice there is almost no friction between the blade and the ice, while in the inline world, there is friction and rolling resistance associated with the wheels. This means that not only is air resistance greater on the ice in absolute terms, but it also contributes a much greater percentage to the total resistance a skater must overcome. (that’s why all the world records are set at altitude). I discuss the implications of altitude on skating in more detail here.

For the other differences, I believe it is essential to investigate the interface between skate and skating surface and examine the differences.

The cross section of a typical speed skating ice blade

Diagram of an inline wheel showing cross section and "footprint"

As can be seen from the diagrams above, when directly upright, there is little functional diference between an inline wheel and an ice blade. When force is applied on a wheel towards the ground (like when you stand on your skates) the wheel deforms and a larger section of wheel is in contact with the ground, giving you more grip. Putting more force on an ice blade while upright will deform the metal, but much more slightly, almost imperceptibly. It is easy to see how harder wheels would roll for longer than softer wheels, as they would deform less, and less rolling energy would be wasted in changing the shape of the wheel.

Of course, very little time is spent in a completely upright position while one is skating. Usually the blade or wheel is on an angle, or as we skaters call it “edge” (that term probably comes from ice originally, where the “edge” is very obvious and quite sharp).

diagram of blade on ice, while the blade is at an angle

putting a wheel on an angle deforms it, causing the contact patch to change shape when rotated

On the ice, putting the blade at an angle causes it to deform slightly. As it deforms, the contact patch lengthens slightly and also turns into a curved line. On a wheel it deforms (the amount is exaggerated in the diagram). If the wheel is not rotating, this deformation doesn’t change the shape of the contact patch much. However, when the wheels are rotating, it changes the shape of the contact patch so that it “points” in a different direction from straight ahead. This is how inline skates turn.

What are the implications for this? There are a few. Firstly, placing more force straight down on a wheel will make it turn more. This allows a skilled inline skater to generate more force in a straight-push by directing some amount of force straight into the ground. This has the added benefit of increasing the contact patch on the ground, resulting in more grip. This effect is limited with an ice blade simply because the metal doesn’t deform as much as the much softer urethane of an inline wheel. (it also has very different elastic properties).

But there’s more. Consider what happens when more weight is placed on a heel or toe.

placing more weight on the heel causes the blade to rock back, but the shape of the contact patch is unchanged

weight distributed evenly (top) and more in the heel (bottom), note the differently-shaped contact patches

As you can see from the diagrams, rocking back on ice skates doesn’t change the contact patch much (it can change slightly if the blade has a different radius over different sections), however doing the same on inline skates causes the heel to want to steer more than the toe which is a self-correcting behaviour.

perhaps an extreme example, but it shows that inline skaters can be more imprecise with their crossover alignment

ice skates are often aligned much more straight, i.e. with a greater overlap in the crossover

This behaviour of the wheels explains many oddities of technique, such as a tendency to “split” the legs (place the left one forward and right one back while both legs are on the ground in the corner) for extra grip on inline skates. It also goes some of the way to explaining why double-push doesn’t work on the ice.¹ In a strict technical sense, double push can be made to work on the ice, but the return in speed would be small compared to the extra effort required to execute it properly, and the tradeoff in reduced “normal” push would be too great.

inline straights involve much more twisting and rocking of the hips to maximise the force while the skate is directly under the skater

Ice straights are typified by flat shoulders and hips to maximize the force at the end of the extension (where turning force and grip is greatest)

Biomechanics tells us that generating force in the legs begins at the hips. The hips should be lowest (because lowering the hip gives the leg greater range of motion) during the part of the push where most force is needed. Because of the way wheels deform, and because of the finite nature of grip in the inline world, the most effective part of an inline push happens directly underneath the skater, when the legs are sandwiched between a skater’s center of mass and the ground and is most able to push the wheels into the ground. On the ice, however, where grip is effectively infinite and very little extra benefit is had from pushing an ice blade into the ground, the most effective part of the push happens when a skater’s legs are sandwiched between the skater’s center of mass and the ground at the point when the rotative force is the greatest (to take advantage of the centrifugal/centripetal forces), i.e. when the leg is almost at full extension, and is just beginning to steer back toward the direction of travel (like in the diagram with Joshua Lose and the force arrows).

Corners are much more similar with the main difference being that inline crossovers don’t neet to “cross over” as much (although they work perfectly well if you do them the same as you would on ice). On the ice, because the push is just as effective at the end of the extension as at the start, an ice skaters right hip stays low throughout the movement. On inlines, because there is less leeway to push into the ground near the end of the extension, inline skaters can afford to let their right hips ride a little higher than their left and not loose significant pushing force, and possibly even gain from the easier biomechanics of not having to operate the left hip joint right at the limit of its range of motion. Skating on a banked track (a track where the surface is tilted inwards in the corners) or on a very grippy indoor floor can make this difference less apparent, and good indoor inline skaters often have technique more similar to ice technique.

Footnotes

So you’re a pretty good inline skater. You’ve won a few national titles, perhaps you’ve even won a few national titles in different countries. Maybe you’ve been to world championships a few times. But now you want to try something new, you want to try ice skating.

There are many reasons why an inline speed skater would want to have a go at ice skating. Some people don’t like hot weather, others don’t like losing a leg-side of skin every time they crash, still others have Olympic aspirations. Whatever your reason, in this article I hope to provide some useful tips into making the transition into what may at first seem like a very alien new environment.

First you will have to get some gear. The most obvious difference between inline skating and ice skating is the ice. Anyone who has ever tried to inline skate on ice will quickly realize that urethane wheels are not ideally suited to skating on frozen water. You will need ice blades. But wait, there’s more… the demands of the sport, especially at the higher levels, require surprisingly different types of gear to most effectively skate around in circles.

It is my personal recommendation that a skater transitioning from inline to ice should first do short track. Short track skating takes place on a track of ice 111m in length while long track happens on a 400m ice track. The smaller confines, and sharper corners should be more familiar to inline skaters (particularly ones with experience in indoor skating), and the nature of short track blades, being fixed as well as having a rounder radius makes it much easier to acquire a “feel” for how ice blades behave. Even if you plan to ultimately transfer to long track, short track gives you a solid base in cornering technique, body position, as well as ice feel. It also helps you get used to the cold.

Starting from the ground up - skates

“there are really only two variables to consider, and those are length and stiffness”

Short track blades are, in comparison to long track blades and inline frames, relatively inexpensive. It is easy to see why – they are structurally quite simple beasts. In the early stages of getting into short track, there are really only two variables to consider, and those are length and stiffness. Length can be chosen based on the size of your feet with 15 inches being a good length for juniors while 17-18 inches is as long as you’ll ever want to get as a senior. Luckily, it is not crucial to get this exactly right as a beginner, because most of your time is spent on 2-3 inches of blade, right in the middle of your skate anyway. Stiffness is determined by your bodyweight, but for beginners it is advisable to err on the side of being too soft, rather than too stiff. As you become more experienced, and your technique improves, how your rocker, your bend, and even tube thickness become more important.

blade covers to walk from wherever you put on your skates, to wherever you are skating

The boots are essentially the same as inline boots. In fact, until relatively recently, short track boots have been IDENTICAL to inline boots, and manufactures didn’t make much of a distinction. Recently though, the bolt spacing on inline boots has changed from 165mm spacing to 195mm spacing. Fortunately, owing to the very simple nature of short track blades, one can easily get around this problem through use of an adaptor. Obviously, if you ever want to be a competitive racer in short track, you will need purpose-built short track boots, but as a beginner, adaptor plates will do just fine. Weber sports sells a good adaptor, and Raps (owners of the double-void extrusion patent) also manufacture an adaptor.

long sleeves and shin pad distinguish this suit from regular inline suits

An obvious difference between ice and most other skating surfaces is that it is cold. Ice halls and stadiums are, as a general rule, quite cold places and one thus has to dress accordingly. Short track suits have long sleeves, that is the most obvious difference. If you look closely at the photo above, you will also notice that they have shin pads. These are relatively soft shin pads, and it is common for skaters to wear harder shin pads underneath. The reason for this is obvious – in an inline pack, you occasionally get bumped by someone else’s skates, but it’s ok because wheels are not particularly sharp. Ice blades on the other hand, are quite sharp and the pads act as protection.

At higher levels of competition, cut proof suits will be required. These often take the form of full suits worn underneath a club or national suit, or sometimes the cut proof material is built into the suit itself. These suits are very expensive however, and protect the skater from very high-speed impacts, and the beginner skater need not concern themselves with them.

protects your neck, keeps you warm, and also catches bits of food

On the subject of protection, there are a plethora of other bits of protective gear used by short trackers to protect themselves from stray skates. The funny looking thing pictured above that looks a bit like a bib is a neck guard. This protects the veins and arteries around your neck from potentially fatal injuries resulting from crashing and ice skates. These are made out of a material that provides a high degree of cut-protection (usually a fibre like dyneema or kevlar). In addition to neck guards, one can also use ankle protectors to protect the very obvious veins and tendons that are concentrated around the ankle area.

ankle protectors protect your ankles. they can also protect your wrists (if you wear them on your wrists)

one final bit of obvious protection that every beginner should have is a pair of gloves. These are useful not just for protection from the cold, and other people’s skates, but eventually for “pivoting” (where you put your hand on the ice in the corners to steady yourself when you’re leaning very low). Most inline skaters should be familiar with the idea of wearing gloves, but it is important to note that gloves for ice skating should have full-fingers.

fits like a glove... because it is a glove

Other essential things to bring to training include a towel for drying the ice off your blades. It may sound slightly strange, but ice skate blades can and do rust. Also, no skating training session on the short track would be complete without a helmet. Special purpose-built short track helmets do exist, but for beginners, any kind of bicycle helmet should suffice.

the same helmet as I use for inline skating

So this is pretty much all the gear you will need to get on the ice and have a skate around. Initially, things like sharpening your skates (which I might cover in a later post) can be done on borrowed club jigs, or skate shops (if you happen to be in Canada or the Netherlands), or even very generous friends. Eventually though, you will have to accumulate the gear required to keep your skates sharp. Eventually, you will also need to learn about how to set up your blades properly. For now, I will just go through the gear.

sharpening jig

with regards to jigs, I would recommend one that easily disassembles because they are easier to travel with. There are many different types of jig out there and they all work fine. In a later post I will cover some basics about how to set up a jig properly (what little I know about it). It is important to note that due to very slight differences between jigs, you should try to always sharpen your skates in the same jig. I am often asked if it really makes a difference and the answer is “yes and no”. Yes, it does make a difference, but no, there is a good chance you won’t notice it. But for a top skater, skating at almost 60km/h, balanced on a piece of steel 1mm thick, these very tiny perturbations can definitely be felt.

a sharpening stone

The other essential part of the sharpening is the ubiquitous sharpening stone. Stones purpose-built for sharpening skates are sold in many specialty skating shops, but any stone that is flat can be used. Most hardware stores carry stones which are designed to be used with tools like chisels. Many specialty kitchen cutlery stores also carry stones, but these have a much finer surface and are more suitable to be used as polishing stones rather than sharpening. In general, the width of the stone should be at least seven inches.

side stones of varying degrees of abrasiveness

In addition to the large sharpening stone, smaller side stones are also needed. These can be much less coarse than the large stone as they are used to refine the edge of the blade from the sides, and not the top. These stones are also useful to have in your skate bag “for emergencies”.

Once you start getting into serious competition, (and presumably some serious speed), the setup of your skates will matter more and more to your progress. Variables such as the rocker and bend of your blades will become important, as will the ability to adjust those variables. For now, I will simply list the equipment required and will leave the explanation of how to use them properly to a later post.

accurate measurement is the beginning

The first tool in the arsenal of a skate tech is the 3-point gauge. The principle is simple enough – it measures how far a central point deviates from a theoretical straight line between two other points. It is the tool that allows you to measure both your bend and your rocker (they are both basically curved lines, curved along different axes).

coarse diamond stone

The “rocker” is the measure of the radius of the curve of the blade along the plane of the blade. Because of the way a blade deforms when you put pressure on it (that is how ice blades turn) the rocker will affect the radius at which you turn corners most effectively. On a long track, where the corner typically has a radius of 23-26 meters (depending on whether you are on the inner or outer lane) the radius of the blade is often very slight, usually between 21-26 meters. A smaller radius (more curve) allows you to feel the blade steering better, while a larger radius allows more blade to be on the ice at any one time, giving you more glide and more pressure.

On a short track, a long track blade cannot ordinarily turn the corner under pressure (you can get away with it if you are going very slowly, or are very light). The radius must be much, much smaller. On my blades, the radius is 6 meters near the toe, 11 meters in the middle, and 5 meters at the heel. This is called a “variable rocker” and is the norm in modern short track skating. Adjusting the rocker is a matter of putting the blades in the sharpening jig, running the gauge over them, and slowly “sharpening away” sections of blade until the radius matches what you’re after. It can take a VERY long time to do this, so we use diamond stones (pictured above) because they have the property of being very abrasive, while still being very smooth and flat. Machines are also commonly used to do the initial work, with the final adjustments being done by hand.

this is not a trick of the light - the blade is bent

The bend, like the rocker is also the measure of a curvy line. This time it is the radius of the curve of the blade along the plane of the ice (it is easier to see what I mean by looking at the photograph above). The bend is considerably more difficult to implement and adjust because it involves, you guessed it, actually bending the blade. The purpose of bending the blade, is so that a longer section of blade is touching the ice while one is cornering (to get the same amount of contact patch without a bend, one would need to put much more pressure on the blade, and sometimes this is simplt not possible). The tradeoff with a bend in any one direction is that you sacrifice a lot of push in the other direction. In short track, where you spend most of your time turning left, this sacrifice is negligible. In any case, the gauge is used in a similar way as is done for rockering, but a different tool is used:

The pennington blade bender

As you may have guessed by the absence of the wooden background in this image, I do not own one of these. For long track skates, the blades are also bent, but the bend is very slight, especially on the left skate (because both edges are important for pushing in long track, whereas in short track, both skates are used mostly for cornering in one direction).

long track skates, quite different from inline skates (important note: these are not "typical" skates that you would buy in a shop)

Once you’ve had a good taste of short track skating, you may want to simply continue with it, or you may want to give long track skating a try. Thankfully, much less protective equipment is required (because collisions between skaters are much less frequent). The boots and blades however are very different. While it is obvious in the above picture that a long track boot is much lower-cut than a short track or inline boot, what is less obvious is that they are much softer structurally. This is because the ankle is a much more active part of the skating technique, and a softer boot allows you to “feel” the ice more, which is essential in long track.

The blades are also very obviously different, with a hinge at the toe giving them the name “clap skate”. The clap basically allows your push to extend further than it normally would – they are not used on short track because it is unsafe to have clap skates when skaters are in such close proximity. It also makes the blades very much more expensive than short track blades. Unfortunately, while it is relatively easy to find inexpensive short track blades from many different manufacturers (Maple, Pennington, Bont, just to name a few), there are basically only two manufacturers of decent long track blades – Viking, and Maple. A third has recently made an entry into the scene, but at the time of writing, I only have authoritative accounts on their top-end product, which I would not recommend for a beginner long track skater.

So to get started, any low-cut boot with 165mm bolt spacing which is reasonably structurally soft will do. As for choice of blades, I would personally recommend the maples for an inline skater making the transition to ice as they are stiffer than the vikings and will “feel” and behave more similarly to inline skates. If you’ve been doing a lot of short track as part of your transition, then you will find soft long track boots an ankle-strengthening experience, but should get the hang of cornering quite quickly. Deeper technical advice I will leave for a later post, but suffice to say that the main difference between ice and inline straights is the timing.

It is important to note that it is extremely beneficial to do all three of these at the same time. Inline skating is excellent for maintaining physical conditioning during the warmer part of the year (and you also get to be outside). Short track skating is the best thing you can do for your corners as it is unforgiving of poor technique and on the ice you effectively have an infinite amount of grip, while long track allows you to reach speeds much higher than is possible on either inline or short track. All three can have benefits for the others and it should surprise nobody that some of the best long track skaters in the world came from a background of either inline or short track.

I shall write more later, and hope to cover the subjects of technique and biomechanics in later posts, but for now I hope that this article has given you a good idea of how to get started. Feel free to leave a comment or contact the author via the contact form on this website.

The complaint from tech-heads is often two-pronged, first they complain about resolution. This complaint is usually leveled at TV, in particular the fuss that is made about HDTV, which is not actually particularly high (see above-referenced article). The second concerns frame rates. There are many standards in existence these days, but only two relevant ones – 24p, and 30p.

Very old TVs (and some new ones) use what is called interlaced scan, which is where the odd and even horizontal lines of the screen come on and off in an alternating pattern. Anything new (read: digital) would be in progressive scan, where the entire image changes with the frame rate. The “p” in the above standards refers to progressive scan. 24p simply means progressive scan at 24 frames per second.

Standard HDTV is usually broadcast in 30p. Generally 1080/30p, which means 1080 lines of vertical resolution at a progressive scan of 30 frames per second. The complaint is that the industry standard for feature films is 24 frames per second. It has been this way for a very long time. I’m not sure why they chose 24 frames per second, but I have a feeling it had something to do with the (primitive) technology of the time. It is certainly possible for our eyes to distinguish between 30 and 24 frames per second and it is often suggested that, since TV is 30 frames per second, it has “trained” our eyes to associate the higher frame rate with TV, and thus movies are condemned to staying at 24p otherwise our brains would automatically think that they are “TV”. James Cameron recently made ripples in the film making industry by suggesting that he might try shooting at 60fps.

After thinking about this for a long time, I think I have figured out the problem and it doesn’t have anything to do with the frame rate per se. The key to understanding what’s going on here is understanding the oft-confused difference between frame rate and shutter speed. We begin (as I did in the article on resolution) by examining the most fundamental piece of hardware in our equation – the human eye. In the previous article, I established a reasonable theoretical maximum resolution for certain sizes of screens, based on the maximum acuity of the eye and the anticipated viewing distances between the eye and the screens. This, however, is slightly more complicated.

The human eye perceives things in a certain way. The maximum aperture of our eyes is roughly equivalent to f/2 on a camera lens, and the resolution in the center is significantly higher than towards the edges. This is part of the reason that pictures like the one above, taken with a wide-aperture lens on a professional SLR camera are generally more appealing than photos taken on cheap point-and-shoot compact cameras where everything seems to be in focus – the former is much closer to what our eyes actually see. Selective focus using what’s called “shallow depth of field” is more than just a simple trick of a photographer to draw your attention to a certain part of the picture – it simulates what our eyes actually do when we draw our attention to a certain portion of our field of view.

Frame rates are a trickier thing to figure out than the relative aperture size of the human eye however. The world (if physics is to be believed) happens as a continuous movement – one could say at an “infinite” frame rate. In high school, we once conducted an experiment where we set up a camera shutter so we could look through it and try to recognize an image. We found that most of us could recognize images when the shutter speed was as high as 1/250 of a second, but beyond that it was too short a time. Nobody could recognize anything past 1/500 although there are likely a handful of people in the world who can. However, many experiments have been done where subjects were shown filmed sequences at over 100 frames per second, and they described it as “artificial” as well as sometimes making them feel ill.

I think the real problem here, is that when motion film is shot at say 100fps, this necessarily means that each of the individual frames is taken at 1/100 of a second or faster. This takes away a lot of blur. In the same way that our eyes naturally blur out most of an image if we aren’t looking directly at it, we also blur out a lot of movement when we aren’t directly tracking it. Traditionally, 24fps film is shot at what is called 180 degree shutter. (see diagram below)

This means that the shutter speed is usually 48fps. Motion picture lenses are usually very wide aperture (and very expensive) to get that selective focus “look” and the exposure is controlled using a combination of extensive lighting setups and neutral density filters (sunglasses for the lenses). Believe it or not, almost all film is shot at this shutter speed. There are some notable exceptions – in Chariots of Fire, for the scene where they’re running along the beach, they painstakingly cut out every second frame and duplicated the frame that was not cut, to give the effect of 1/48 shutter at 12 frames per second. In the more recent film Gladiator, for the fight scenes, the shutter speed was approximately doubled, but the frame rate was kept the same (1/100 shutter at 24 frames per second). The interesting thing to note here, is that both effects are noticeable, even if they weren’t immediately apparent.

The point here is that, for relative motion, we perceive things with a blur. Changing that blur in any way will produce a noticeable effect. HDTV in 30 frames per second was probably shot with a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second, which is significantly faster than 1/48. In addition, TV cameras have relatively small image sensors, usually 2/3″ format, which has about 1/17 the area of a full-frame sensor, which translates to having much less ability to offer selective focus in the way a proper motion picture camera can (part of the reason for this, is that with live TV, it makes it easier to keep everything in focus, whereas in motion picture shooting, everything is meticulously planned, including the exact point of focus, and it usually takes 3 people to operate 1 camera, whereas in TV each camera is expected to only require one person to operate).

So really, the problem has nothing to do with the frame rate itself. Our eyes are clearly OK with perceiving an infinitely-high frame rate (a.k.a. the real world) but the shutter speed at which the film is recorded must, in most cases, simulate our ordinary perception of the world, including blur, otherwise our minds will reject it as “fake”. The practical problem with this, is how to make it possible to shoot at frame rates around 1/40 and 1/50 of a second, yet project at frame rates where each frame may only be visible for 1/60 of a second or less. One promising solution that has been tried is software interpolation (basically “guessing” the intermediate frames) which seems like a pretty good idea. However, the software is not sufficiently advanced to guess very well – typically hard edges and contrasts are what gets interpolated (because it’s easy for software to “see” these things), but the key to achieving the proper effect is to also interpolate the blur.

As long as motion is in any way mechanically-captured, it will be impossible to project film at a higher frame rate than the reciprocal of the shutter speed (e.g. 60fps for 1/60 of a second). However, there is promise in the area of electronic motion picture capture, although the bandwidth capacity for image sensors still has to increase significantly for this to be possible (as well as processing power at the point of capture, not to mention the bandwidth increases necessary for higher resolutions, like I mentioned in my other article). Still, the rate at which technology is advancing in this area is breathtaking to say the least, and I feel confident that it is entirely conceivable within our lifetimes that we will see maximal resolution films in very high frame rates that still look “natural” with proper out-of-focus blur AND motion blur.

Anyone who has ever been involved at a fairly serious level in the world of sport will have come across nutritional supplements of some kind. These can range from simply having electrolytes in your drinking water to practically constructing entire meals out of various powders and vitamin tablets. There are many arguments for and against the use of supplements, and to what extent they should be used, and to what extent they are even useful. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the bottom line is that many of these supplements work… but is that the whole story?

Obviously I wouldn’t be writing an article about it if there wasn’t a story of some kind to be told here. As with any good investigation, the golden rule is to follow the gold, so to speak. The big money in supplements is to be had in the US market and, not surprisingly, most companies that deal in supplements are based in the US and primarily operate out of there. As a result, most of the guidelines concerning regulation of the industry are shaped by what happens regulations-wise in the US.

Regulation

How do we regulate supplements? I guess it comes down to what they are. We eat them, so I suppose they are food. You can’t really call vitamin tablets “food” though, so maybe they could be classified as medicine. Of course, they’re not really medicines, and I’m sure the companies that manufacture them don’t want to go through the very arduous and rigorous process of having to get them approved as medicines. The truth is that in most jurisdictions these supplements are classified as neither food nor medicines, and as a result they are not subject to any of the regulations that food or medicines are subject to. Is this a problem? It can be.

The attitude amongst EU regulators is similar. Nobody really cares about regulating the supplement industry. The saying basically goes “if you get sick from this stuff, it’s your own fault, nobody is telling you to eat it”, which is true to an extent. It isn’t really food because nobody needs to eat it, and you never eat it in the same amounts or frequency as food. What this basically means is that supplement manufacturers have no obligations whatsoever concerning the quality or purity of what goes into the supplements, and this can have far-reaching consequences for those who use them.

Melamine

Take for example a protein powder. People who do a lot of resistance training (like weights) take protein powders after their workouts because it aids recovery, these powders typically being absorbed by your body much faster than just eating a few chunks of meat following a workout. You look on the back of the packaging and check the per-100g content of protein and are satisfied that you are getting adequate protein to recover from your training session.

Let’s look deeper though. How is protein measured? Protein is typically measured by measuring the nitrogen content (because proteins contain nitrogen) of food. There are ways to artificially increase the amount of nitrogen in food in order to give a higher figure for protein content. Thanks to the Chinese Milk Scandal, we are now familiar with melamine. Melamine is a chemical that is used in fire retardants, furniture coatings, and plastic dinnerware – it isn’t edible. Mixing small amounts of melamine into milk allows the milk to be thinned out considerably while maintaining the illusion of a high protein content. Of course, there is no extra protein, and when the melamine gets into your body, it pairs up with cyanuric acid (melamine is a base) and forms crystals in the kidneys.

Ever heard stories about bodybuilders having trouble with their kidneys because of the protein powder? Melamine is probably the reason why. The LD50 for melamine is actually quite low, but if you ingest it regularly, it will accumulate faster than your body is able to flush it out. Obviously, it will have a greater effect on infants and small pets, which is how the original Chinese Milk Scandal broke. Putting melamine in food is completely illegal of course, but since supplements like protein powder aren’t technically classified as food, there’s nothing to stop them from doing this, except perhaps the occasional law suit.

Heavy Metals

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. A consumer reports article last year reported finding heavy metals in many popular supplements. Of course, all of the supplement companies implicated came out with scathing attacks on every aspect of the article, and tried to blur the issue by comparing their products to certain kinds of shellfish (which are known to contain similar amounts of heavy metals). These comparisons are absurd, of course, because nobody consumes shellfish in anywhere near the amounts or frequency as people consume protein powder. While it is true that the amounts are quite small, and for most users insignificant, it does highlight the fact that these companies are not subject to any real regulation or quality control aside from their own.

In addition, (organic) contaminants have been known to react with things in our stomachs and turn into substances which appear on the doping list. Whether this was deliberate or not (look up “nandrolone contamination”) is difficult to say, but the outcomes of such contamination are perhaps more immediate and consequential to a competitive athlete who may end up serving a ban through no fault of her own, than the long-term consequences of lead or cadmium poisoning.

So what do we do about this? We like the convenience of these drinks and bars, ready for us when we finish a workout to aid our recovery, yet we are faced with uncertainty about contaminants, benign or otherwise, in these supplements. Large government bodies generally don’t care for the issue because it really only affects a small portion of the population, and taking supplements is entirely voluntary – it’s not like food, where you have to eat it all the time (and governments have enough trouble regulating the food industry). We certainly can’t trust the word of the supplement manufacturers, because they’re hardly going to bad-mouth their own products… So do we just have to put up with this big fat caveat emptor?

An Idea

I have an idea… we could start some kind of online index where the community of elite athletes and coaches submit their favourite supplements (and possibly donate some money to pay for the lab time) and we test them independently. The impact of the consumer reports article clearly shows that public opinion counts for a lot in this industry, and building a publicly accessible lookup-list of supplements with independent testing, and the endorsement of the very people who need this oversight the most would be an invaluable resource. I’m happy to lead this at the start, being something of an athlete as well as something of a scientist (as well as having a small amount of experience with building websites). I’m envisioning that it will become a little bit like dpreview.com has become for the digital camera industry.

What do people think?

Indeed, it is a grave fault of most education systems that artistic skills are not taught as rigorously as so-called academic skills as students grow older. Furthermore, society has a tendency to pigeon-hole people into either being scientific, or artistic in a way that implies that both are somehow mutually exclusive. Of course, often too late, people realize that to be a very successful science-person, one needs creativity, which isn’t explicitly encouraged until students are almost ready to go into research. My views on the faults of modern educations systems are perhaps best left to another post, but for now, I present a how-to guide for drawing molecules.

Molecules are beautiful things. You take these little things called “atoms” which generally consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. The number of protons determines which chemical element the atom is classified as, and also tends to determine the number of electrons which orbit the nucleus. For reasons far beyond the scope of this article, these electrons are arranged in “shells” around the nucleus and these shells tend to “prefer” a certain number of electrons to be in them. This desire to complete the shells causes different atoms to come together and share electrons in what are called “covalent bonds” (I encourage the curious reader to read further). This is how we get molecules.

I drew my diagrams with the purpose of assisting a friend who is completing her PhD in Chemistry. Not being trained in the use of graphics software, most of her diagrams had consisted of crudely-scanned drawings borrowed from other papers, as well as the occasional drawing made using Microsoft Power Point *shudder*. Obviously, if power point can produce a usable result, then that’s fine, but in my eyes, this is similar to calculating the area of a circle using 3.1 instead of .

I first learned how to use graphics software while in high school, during a time of my life when I wanted to be a graphic or industrial designer. I eventually switched to mathematics because I thought it was more beautiful and thought I would never use those skills again. However, they became very useful when I came to write my honours thesis and I was in need of some mathematical diagrams.

Graphics software is generally fairly easy to use, though most packages are so feature-packed that they can seem overwhelming and it can take quite some time before you can use them with any kind of “fluency”. For scientific diagrams, I like to use Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is an example of a “vector graphics editor” which means that, unlike a “bitmap graphics editor” images are not saved as a set of pixels with specific values assigned to each, but instead are a set of instructions. When you draw a circle in photoshop, the image is a bunch of points with position values and colour/brightness values. When you draw a circle in illustrator, it is saved as a coordinate for the center, radius, border colour, fill colour.

Bitmap editors are ideal for things like photographs, but for technical drawings, vector editors are preferable. This is because images are infinitely scalable, and complex diagrams are reduced to an easy-to-manipulate instructions set, rather than a difficult-to-separate bunch of pixels.

Let’s draw a circle, and fill it with a “gradient fill”. I made the gradient go from white to red, and made it radial, to give the illusion of a three-dimensional ball. This is our first atom.

Take oxygen (you have to, otherwise you would suffocate, har… har…). Its atomic number is 8, so it has 8 protons and 8 electrons (it may have any number of neutrons, but usually has 8). It has an s-shell and a p-shell. The s-shell has two electrons in it and is full, while the p-shell has six, and is two short of its optimum number. The oxygen atom meets another oxygen atom and finds that if they both share two electrons, then they can complete each others’ p-shell. Since they share two electrons, this bond is called a “double bond”. We begin our drawing by first laying out a diagram of the structure:

Simple enough. Now we take two red balls like the one above, and we slice a bit off the side of one like so:

Then all you do is rotate the oxygen atom on the right by 135 degrees in the clockwise direction and then put the two together to get our tidy little representation of .

If we want to be really tricky we can modify this diagram slightly to make it even more “realistic”. In vector drawing programs, lines are generally called “paths” and they are defined by points. When lines pass through these points, they can change direction abruptly resulting in a zig-zag effect, or the can pass through the lines smoothly. A combination of these is used for the right effect. So let’s take our sliced oxygen atom and add a point to the path in the middle of the straight line. Then we make that point one of those “smooth” ones (technically speaking, they’re knots in a spline). The two points at either end of this line remain as the non-smooth type, and we end up with:

It is perhaps difficult to see the usefulness of going to all that trouble until one observes the finished result. Varying the curvature of that cut-out can vary the apparent viewing angle of the molecules. Other little tricks like making the atom in the pair that is furthest from the observer slightly smaller, also adds to the 3D “pop” of these illustrations.

Of course, beyond a certain point the curvature of the surface of the nearest atom of the pair obscures the curved surface of the point at which they join (such as in the example on the far right). In this case, one can simply place one circle on top of the other and with a slight offset.

Let’s try something more difficult. How about some booze? The layout of the molecule for ethanol is as follows:

Now anyone who’s done even a little bit of high school chemistry will know that the atomic number for hydrogen is 1, and the number for carbon is 6. Oxygen’s is 8. When visualizing this, we must remember that the atoms will be different sizes. Fortunately, others have gone to the trouble of measuring atomic diameters so we don’t have to, and there are many lookup tables available on the internet. Here’s one I ripped off wikipedia:

So, as we can see, oxygen is slightly smaller than carbon, and hydrogen is way smaller than either of the two. Next we have to consider the geometry of the molecules. This can actually get pretty complicated because the shape of different s, p, d etc. shells differ in unusual ways. Fortunately, for the first few elements of the periodic table, much is already known about the way they form bonds. Carbon (which wants to form four bonds) likes to form them in a tetrahedral way, while oxygen seems to form its bonds at 109 degree angles. Taking all these into consideration, we end up with:

So these are relatively simple molecules. When we draw more complex molecules, we often have to proceed slowly and in stages, otherwise we get confused (or at least I do). Let’s try a surfactant. For this example, I’m just going to use fluorinated compound of . First I start out with a rough sketch of what it’s going to look like:

It’s just one long chain of carbon atoms where one end is attached to mostly hydrogen, while the other is bonded to fluorine. So we begin by simply drawing a long chain of carbon atoms. However, I’ve drawn one half in a slightly unusual way. The reason I’ve done this, is because I happen to know that long chains of have a tendency to twist the carbon chain because they’re so “full”. The hydrogens, however, do not present a problem, so the chain for that section is very regular.

The next step is to put on the hydrogen atoms. This is relatively easy. (six carbon atoms are obscured from view)

Now, due to the twisting nature of the fluorinated part of the chain, putting the fluorine atoms on is more than a simple matter of drawing it once, then copying it 25 times. The angle from which these atoms are viewed changes with every successive pair. So instead, I begin with a “palette” of different atoms (which look a little bit like moon phases).

Finally, I stick them on. I look at where they are and then select the most appropriate fluorine atom. Sometimes I make slight adjustments. By the time I’m done, it looks a bit like this:

where hopefully it is a little easier to see the twisting that I was talking about before. The observant reader will have noticed that, just looking at the diagram, there seems to be no real reason why the fluorine section couldn’t have been straight and regular like the carbon one. However, there’s more to it than what is represented in the diagram, and we need to remember that this is simply a representation to help us visualize what’s going on (in the case of this surfactant, we have a hydrophobic “tail” section – the bit with all the fluorines, and a hydrophilic “head” section. Many surfactants also have an OH-group on the head which is even more hydrophilic because it forms hydrogen bonds with water molecules).

Molecules do, of course, get much more complicated. Much larger molecules exist, such as crystals, which are often, essentially, one giant molecule. They are, however not difficult to draw because of their very regular, repetitive nature. Right at the top of the complexity ratings of course is DNA, so to finish off…

so we begin our little diagram

So… we have these phosphate-sugar bits on the sides that act like railroad tracks. In the middle, you have base-pairs guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A), thymine (T) in which is contained our genetic information. So you take the above, and you set it out in a ladder:

Then we twist it into shape. Since I can’t be bothered drawing such an enormously complex molecule (or even a small part of one) I present an example that I ripped off google image search.

…and it replicates.

A batsman from the Columbia University Cricket Club faces a ball at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx

With the ICC Cricket World Cup under way, I thought this would be a good time to write an article about cricket for the benefit of my friends who are not familiar with the game. With any luck I will be able to communicate a basic understanding of the game, and perhaps even a bit of appreciation for the various skills and difficulties associated with it. At the very least, I hope that my friends will be able to understand the occasional facebook status update about results from the world cup. Cricket is often confusing to newcomers because (in typical English fashion) the nomenclature of the game is strange, and many words have more than one meaning depending on the context.

Cricket is a very old bat-and-ball game that originated in England. It is popular in England, and is considered by some to be the national sport. When the British Empire was at its peak, it spread the game throughout the colonies, and it is therefore no surprise that the world’s strongest cricketing nations are former British colonies. I first played it as a schoolboy in Hong Kong, although curiously enough I hardly played it while I lived in Australia (where it is one of the most popular summer sports). I briefly played for the Columbia University Cricket Club when I lived in New York.

There are various variants of the sport which are most easily distinguished by the length of time it takes to complete a game. At the very top, there are “test matches” which last up to five days – this is the highest form of the game. It is also the least-understood form of the game. The other two most common forms are “One Day Internationals” (ODIs) and “Twenty20″. ODIs, as the name suggests, last for about one day and consist of one innings of 50 overs per side. Twenty20 is basically identical, except with only 20 overs per side and they generally last just over three hours.

Basic Rules

The game is played on an oval-shaped grass field with no fixed dimensions. The boundary is marked by a rope, and the middle is dominated by a 22-yard rectangular pitch called the wicket. At either end of this rectangular pitch stand three vertical bits of wood which are called stumps (sometimes also called wickets) across the top which are placed bails. During the game, the batting team will have two batsmen batting, standing at either end of the wicket, while the fielding side will have their full team of 11 players in the field.

The object of the game is to accumulate a higher number of runs than the other team. A run is scored when the two batsmen swap ends after a ball is bowled (most often after one of the batsmen has hit it). If a ball is hit and reaches the boundary it is automatically counted as four runs, if it passes the boundary without touching the ground, then it is counted as six runs.¹ Runs are also awarded for wides (when the ball is bowled outside a certain area) and for no-balls. No balls also result in the ball having to be bowled again. These extra runs are called “extras”.

A bowler (like a pitcher) will take a run up to one end of the rectangular pitch and then bowl a ball overarm towards the other end in the general direction of one of the batsmen. This happens six times in an over after which a different bowler will bowl the ball from the other end towards the other set of stumps. The objective of the bowlers is to remove the batsmen by getting them out while simultaneously limiting the number of runs.

There are many ways of going out in cricket. If the ball is hit, then caught before it touches the ground, then the batsman is out (this includes if it skims the edge of the bat, and then is caught by the wicket-keeper). If the batsman is outside his crease (a line 4 feet in front of the wicket) and the ball touches those bits of wood such that the bails are dislodged, then he is out. If this happens right after he has been bowled to, then he is “stumped”, if it happens while the batsmen are swapping ends in the process of scoring a run, then he is “run out”. If a ball is bowled, and the batsman misses it and it carries through to the wickets and dislodges the bails, then the batsman is “clean bowled”.

In a typical innings, the bowlers will continue bowling balls at the batsmen until either all of the batsmen are out, or a predetermined number of balls are bowled. (In a test match where there are, in principle, unlimited overs, there exists an additional option to declare – to end an innings before all the batsmen are out, which can be important strategically).

Hopefully the above explanations have given you a basic understanding of the mechanics of the game, so if you catch it on TV it won’t just look like a bunch of guys standing out in a field getting sunburnt.

A cricket ball

Basic Strategy

A well-rounded team will generally consist of 5 batsmen, 5 bowlers, and a wicket-keeper. Of course, at high levels of cricket, most of the players are decently capable of playing any position, but they will usually specialize in one aspect of the game. Players who are talented at batting and bowling are called all-rounders and are quite rare, and valuable players to have for obvious reasons.

A cricket ball is made from cork and is covered in leather, with a seam stitched around its equator. This gives bowlers all manner of devious ways in which to get a batsman out. This is generally what happens:

At the start of the innings, the ball is new and due to aerodynamics will move through the air faster. In the early overs of an innings the type of bowling primarily employed is that of the fast variety (typically 130+ km/h). Like fast serves in tennis, and fastballs in baseball, these are difficult for batsmen simply because they are so fast that they give batsmen less time to react to the delivery, making it difficult to score runs and also making them vulnerable to going out. Fast bowling is also psychologically intimidating, with bowlers sometimes deliberately bowling a ball to bounce into the body of a batsman to unsettle him.

As the game progresses, the ball becomes worn. However, a good fielding side will take care to keep one side of the ball more “polished” than the other. This has the effect of making the ball swing in the air. A ball coming at a batsman at 130 km/h AND changing path through the air presents obvious problems for his run-scoring agenda. Then there’s the added unpredictability of the bounce if the ball lands on the seam.

After a while the ball becomes really worn, and it is difficult for the fast bowlers to get the same speeds as they did at the start of the innings. The fast bowlers also get tired. The roughened surface of the ball allows for another kind of bowling to be used effectively – spin. The principle is simple enough – bowl the ball down the wicket and spin it so that it changes direction on the bounce. Being consistently accurate with spin delivery is difficult though, and a poorly-executed spin-ball, because of it’s lower speed, may be struck more easily by a batsman. Effective spin bowling (see below) however, with its unpredictability both in the air, and off the bounce can be used to devastating effect.

On the receiving end of all this are the batsmen. Unlike in baseball, where the ball must be hit within a certain area, a ball may travel anywhere after striking a cricket bat. Glancing shots which use the pace of a fast bowler more than the momentum of the cricket bat are common. Typically the best batsmen are sent to bat first because, even though they have to face the brunt of the fast bowling attack, they also get the opportunity to face more balls because if they are later in the order, then there is a chance that they may run out of time in which to score runs.

Good batsmen are usually not only very coordinated with hitting a ball with a bat, but also have very quick reflexes to react to inconsistent bounces, or the swing of a fast ball. It is widely rumoured that legendary batsman Donald Bradman practiced by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump against a sheet of corrugated iron to hone his reflexes.

The currently in-progress Cricket World Cup consists of a tournament of one day matches. In an ODI, a coin is tossed and the winner of the toss decides whether he wants his team to bat or bowl first. The decision can be a very important one because the condition of the wicket changes throughout the day. As the ground gets pounded by cricket balls it slowly becomes rougher and the bounce more unpredictable, or so the theory goes. Other factors to consider include the moisture in the ground (the ball rolls faster on dry hard ground, making boundaries slightly easier), and even changing weather conditions (although that is more a consideration for 5-day test matches).

Understanding the Numbers

Cricket is a sport that lends itself very readily to statistics. While I could go on for many more articles on the various cricket stats that I have committed to memory, here I will try to construct a rough guide to understanding the reports that might come out in the news relating to the current world cup.

Let’s begin with the match report from the recent game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka:

“Pakistan 277/7 (50 ov); Sri Lanka 266/9 (50 ov) – Pakistan won by 11 runs”

277/7 (two hundred and seventy seven for seven) is something you’ll often hear in a quick news report, and sometimes the big and small number is swapped. The side who bats first appears first. The big number is the number of runs. 277 is a decent score, especially considering that these are two very good, well-rounded teams playing each other. In an ODI, each side bowls 50 overs, which is 300 balls. The small number is the number of wickets lost. Every time a batsman goes out, it is called a “wicket” (remember my earlier point about confusing nomenclature?). So this means that Pakistan scored 277 runs, and in doing so seven batsmen went out. The number in brackets, not always present on result reports, is the number of overs. In this case, both teams reached the end of all of their overs and the winning side easily determined by counting the runs. This was a relatively close game with both teams having to “use up” all their balls before a result could be determined. The theoretical maximum number of runs per over is 36, and scores of 10 per over are not unusual, especially in the final overs of a game.

Now a different situation:

“Bangladesh 58 (18.5 ov); West Indies 59/1 (12.2 ov) – West Indies won by 9 wickets (with 226 balls remaining)”

The 58 with no number after it indicates that Bangladesh were “all out” for 58 runs (you could write 58/10, but that wastes ink). In this game the West Indies were able to bowl out the entire Bangladeshi team for only 58 runs on the 5th ball of the 19th over. Either the “windies” were having a very good bowling day, or Bangladesh were having a shocker of a batting day, though I suspect both factors conspired to create this result. The windies had no trouble chasing the total, and achieved this on the 2nd ball of the 13th over for the loss of only one wicket (so only one guy went out). When there is a successful run-chase, the margin of victory is not the number of runs (because who knows how high a total the winning team could have achieved) but instead is the difference in number of wickets taken by each team. The number of balls remaining is not always included.

Ok, lets have a look at a typical line on a scorecard:

| 1 . . 4 . . | . . 4 . 2 . | 1 . . W . nb . | . . 1 . . 2 | . . . . . . |

The numbers are the number of runs. The dots are just our lazy way of writing zero. This is where the term “dot ball” comes from. When a bowler bowls a dot ball, it is well-executed enough to prevent the batsman from scoring any runs. The big “W” means wicket, indicating that a batsman is out, and “nb” is short for “no ball”. Notice that no runs were scored during the last over – this is called a “maiden” over.

Batting stats are fairly easy to understand. There’s the batting average, which is the average number of runs that the batsman scores per wicket. This means that if a batsman somehow manages to get through a bunch of games without going out (he could still be “in” when the game runs out of overs, or he could be the unhappy half of the final pair when the last guy goes out). When you think about batting averages as being per wicket, although almost superfluous for batting, it helps us understand bowling stats.

Sometimes a brief match report will take the form:

Australia 262 for 6 (Watson 79, Clarke 58*, Mpofu 2-58) beat Zimbabwe 171 (Cremer 37, Johnson 4-19, Tait 2-34) by 91 runs

The names in brackets are “highlight” performances. So in th Australian batting innings, Watson scored 79 runs, and Clarke 58 runs not-out (that’s what the asterisk means). In the same innings, Mpofu (a bowler from Zimbabwe) gave away only 58 runs, for two wickets.

The other major stats that get bandied about are a batsman’s “strike rate”, which is simply the percentage of runs-from-balls that a batsman makes, and a bowler’s “economy” is the number of runs he gives away per wicket.

So hopefully this has given you a good overview of the game of cricket and will help you understand and enjoy the cricket world cup and any subsequent cricket games you might find yourself watching.

Getting ready to bat for the Columbia University Cricket Club. I went out for a "duck" that day (0 runs)

Footnotes

But how does one go about training our core muscles? Most people immediately think about doing lots of situps, or crunches. If you want to have good-looking abs, then by all means do lots of situps, but this is only a small part of the story. If you want to build core strength, it is essential to also target the lower back, the obliques, and even the pelvic floor muscles (the muscles that you use to hold your pee in). Targeting these muscles can sometimes be quite difficult because it requires you to really think about the exercises you’re doing, rather than repetitively go through the motions.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the experience of training myself to isolate various abdominal muscles while simultaneously being able to watch them on an ultrasound machine. There are various exercises that I do to train these muscles and I am going to try to describe some of them in this article.

A helpful thing to remember is that the point of all of these exercises is not to build bigger muscles. The point is to isolate certain muscles, and build strength and coordination of those muscles. These are the muscles that will form a stable base from which almost all bodily movement begins.

Start by lying down on your back with your feet on the ground and with your knees bent. Try to stay completely relaxed. Feel around the front of your lower torso with your fingers until you find the point at which your hip bones protrude. Move upwards just slightly from that point and press lightly with your fingers. Now draw your navel towards your spine (suck your tummy in). You should be able to feel those muscles activate (fyi, these are your internal obliques). Concentrate on being able to breathe in and out while maintaining that muscle contraction and keeping your belly in.

The first exercise is quite easy. While keeping those muscles activated, gently lift your left leg from the ground by about a centimeter (0.39 inches) and then put it down, repeat with the right leg. When you’re comfortable with that, you can straighten the leg that you are lifting. As the exercise gets harder, it is tempting to activate different muscles to help out, but you should resist this urge and concentrate on using those muscles just above your hips. Remember, the idea isn’t to become super-strong, it is to become more coordinated.

Next, flip over onto all fours and while keeping your tummy sucked in, extend your leg backwards without moving the rest of your body. Once you can do that smoothly, make it harder by extending your alternate arm. (see diagram)

The added difficulty of having to balance on an alternate hand and knee also makes you think a bit about where your “center” is. For males, it is in the middle of the body, about where the belly button is, and for females it is a few inches lower (and for speed skaters it’s even lower because we have such fat thighs). Not coincidentally, it is all the little muscles surrounding that center of mass that we are training for coordination. Concentrate on this first set of relatively easy exercises for a while before moving on to the next exercises, otherwise the proper muscles won’t be adequately trained. If they’re not adequately trained, you’ll move onto the next exercises, get frustrated, and your body will go back to using the wrong muscle groups – the ones associated with actually moving. We’re concentrating on those muscles that are used for stabilizing.

Once you’ve mastered the initial exercises, it’s time to move onto slightly harder stuff. Most of these exercises are designed with a sport like speed skating in mind (surprised? don’t be). Speed skating is very demanding on core stability and also on the stabilizing muscles around the hip joints, and to a lesser extent, the ankles. The following exercises will reflect this.

Start on your back again with your knees bent and your feet on the ground as before. Draw your navel towards your spine. Instead of lifting your leg up though, lift your hips off the ground. You should feel a muscle contraction in your gluteals and hamstrings when you do this. It is very important to keep those correct muscles in your abs isolated.

This is a considerably more difficult exercise than the first one, so take your time getting used to it before progressing to the next level, which is simply to take your arms off the ground and cross them over your chest, to add a little bit of instability to the structure.

Once you’re comfortable with this, you can do it with only one leg. Be careful though, make sure you are still isolating those muscles above your hips, and make absolutely sure you keep your body completely square (don’t rock from side to side) while balanced only on one foot.

Once you’ve mastered that, you can go one step further and place your feet on an inflatable exercise ball and instead of lifting and lowering your hips, you bend and straighten your legs. This exercise (and you’ll feel it) also targets the stabilizing muscles in your hips as well as your core.

By now the muscles in the sides of your core are probably starting to get stronger. There is a tendency to create abdominal pressure by contracting the whole group of lower abdominal muscles, including the center ones. The feeling is similar to that of being constipated. Try to resist doing this. A way to try to get the correct “feel” for which muscles you’re trying to contract (short of experimenting with a real-time ultrasound imager) is to lie on your back, draw your navel towards your spine, breathe in while concentrating on pushing your ribs out then breathing out as if through a straw. You should feel abdominal muscles in your sides, even in your back, and slightly further up your trunk tighten. Those are the muscles you should be recruiting. (If all of what I just said confuses you, don’t worry about it and just concentrate on keeping your belly sucked in).

The next exercise is quite difficult. Don’t be surprised if you can only do it for about 30 seconds to start with. If you do it frequently (like, every other day) you should be able to slowly build up to at least 2 minute sets.

Variously called the “ab plank”, “prone hold”, and “elbows and toes”, this is a very simple and very effective exercise at training the core stabilizing muscles. Resist the temptation to activate the ab muscles down the center of your tummy (the 6-pack muscles, or rectus abdominus) because it defeats the purpose of the exercise. An interesting thing that you’ll find, is that if you only use those 6-pack muscles, you’ll have a lot of trouble getting past 2 minutes, but if you concentrate on training the side muscles, then it actually becomes easier to hold the position for a long time. I used to be able to do 5 minute sets of these without too much difficulty.

Once you’re confident with this, you can move onto your sides.

The ab muscles are not naturally as strong, nor are they designed to bear as much weight in that direction as in the forward-backward direction (which is part of the reason why we’re much better at running forwards-backwards, than sideways), so don’t expect to be able to hold this position for very long. If you’re into speed skating, you’ll want to eventually do these side holds with only one foot. If you’re after even more difficulty, elevate that foot slightly and then move your hips up and down in a slow controlled manner.

All of the exercises so far have been very static. The reason for this is that the idea is to train your muscles to stabilize you, and when the muscles are being used in that way, they have to contract, but don’t often move very much. Depending on your sport, you may also want to do exercises which involve motion. I will present a few very general exercises here, but you should try to design exercises which involve movements that closely mimic your movements in your chosen sport.

This next exercise is useful because it activates a fairly steady muscle contraction over a wide range of motion. Done properly, it can also aid in your flexibility.

This is the ball throw situp. Being by sitting on the “corner” of an inflatable ball and have someone throw you a heavy object, like a 5kg medicine ball.

Catch the ball (this is important) and arch yourself over the inflatable ball, keeping the medicine ball over your head, then come back and throw the ball at whoever threw it at you. Try to get the thrower to aim the ball at your head, or slightly above your head. The ball should trace a path through the air like a setup for a football header shot (then you catch it, instead of headering it, because it’s a 5k medicine ball).

This exercise is simple enough, you kneel on an inflatable exercise ball. Try to kneel “up straight” and if you find it too easy, then cross your arms. If you have a strong and coordinated core (and reasonably good balance), this shouldn’t be very difficult.

The obvious progression from kneeling on the ball is to stand on it. Difficult as this sounds, it is actually surprisingly easy, especially if you’re good at kneeling on the ball. The tricky part is getting onto the ball. The best way to do it is with the help of a friend, but if you don’t have any friends then try to do it near a wall, or use the squat rack frame to support you as you step up. Try not to use a box because it is very easy to fall off the ball just as you’re mounting or dismounting and the sharp corners of a box aren’t the best things to land on.

Another exercise with a heavy medicine ball. It is especially easy in exercises like this to forget to draw your navel towards your spine and activate the right muscles, so don’t forget. Begin by just throwing the ball at each others’ chests, but you want to eventually be throwing the ball to either side, and in slightly unpredictable ways. Also slowly increase the distance between throwers because it forces you to throw the ball harder, and that in turn teaches you to brace your ab muscles more strongly.

This exercise is much more speed skating specific, but can be useful to the average core stability workout nutcase. Holding the ball out in front of you with slightly bent arms, begin in a lunge position, with both knees at 90 degrees, then step up onto a box (it should be about knee-height), stand up straight while bringing the leg you didn’t use to step up with up in front of you (the diagram is better than my description). It should be done in one fluid and controlled movement, and not too quickly. Pause at the top, count to three, then come back down. Do about ten on one leg, then swap legs. Eventually, when you’ve mastered this movement, you can do it with a barbell across your shoulders, but be careful and have someone to spot you, especially if the weight starts to get heavy.

Start with a very light weight on the bar (or just the bar) when you switch because the position that your abs are in when you have your arms in front of you, compared to when you’re supporting a barbell is slightly different and and arms-in-front position is more stable. (Rugby fans will notice Johnny Wilkinson’s preparation before a kick involves holding his arms out in front of him – that’s why he does it, to stabilize his core before the kick).

This last exercise involves a twisting motion, and requires a cable attached to some weights. I imagine professional tennis players and woodcutters do this one all the time (I call it the “wood chop”), but anyone else who uses their abs can benefit too. Simply sit on the inflatable exercise ball, draw your navel towards your spine, and pull the cable across your body with your arms straight. Try to lock your arms and shoulders into one solid object and twist that object against the lower half of your body (i.e. keep your hips still). Not a lot of weight is required to make this an effective exercise. Concentrate on keeping your heels on the ground. If your heels lift off, then you’ve got too much weight. Again, the object is to move in a slow and controlled manner.

So there you have it. The core of my core workout. Suffice to say that I didn’t miss out on the Olympics for lack of a strong core (it was mostly to do with my speed skating technique). For sports that are particularly core-intensive (like mogul-skiing, their workout is crazy) there are more, and harder exercises of course, but even they would have had to start by mastering these.

There is far too much emphasis these days among sports people to concentrate on building up the motor-movement muscles, and WAY too much emphasis on the appearance of muscles in “general fitness” circles. Truth is, there are huge gains to be made in sports performance from concentrating more on technique, coordination, and core stability. For the casual weekend warrior, this is especially important for injury prevention.

Upside-down world map. Notice how the projection still makes countries like Greenland, Russia and Canada much bigger than they really are (Africa is in fact many times larger than Greenland). Cartographers for Social Equality wouldn't be happy about this.

I’m not happy with the world. I should be more specific – the world is great, but I’m not happy about the way humans conduct themselves while they are on it. It’s no secret that I have a strong belief that if we carry on doing what we do, and treating the world the way we have, then we’re not going to be around for too much longer. Our existence simply isn’t sustainable. Moreover, it is unsustainable on many different levels. One of the biggest problems I have with conservatives, and I may write more about this in a later article, is that if you had to boil conservatism down to its most fundamental principle, a principle that spans as broad a base of conservatism as you can hope to encompass, then it is this – trust in the old ways, for they served us in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The hidden implication here is that new ways should be viewed very cautiously and resisted on principle. Of course, to continue on the line of hidden implications, it also implies that the past is always a good blueprint for dealing with the future, and also that “keeping things the way they are” is necessarily a desirable thing. Both are questionable. In this post however, I do not wish to talk about politics.

To begin, a (criminally) brief overview of the whole-earth equation. We grow food, we eat it. Eating gives us energy so we can grow more food. If we have extra energy or food, we can do something with it. So basically anything we do that isn’t linked to either the growing of food, or the generation of energy must be “paid for” by the surplus of our production. Energy complicates things slightly because solar, geothermal, and gravity (the moon’s – tidal) are the only sources of energy that really exist. Things like coal and oil are merely “batteries” that have been charged over millions of years and happen to be very dense energy-wise which makes them useful. This is why electricity is so useful – it allows us to easily convert energy from one form to another with minimal waste. Throwing more energy at a problem is usually a pretty good way to solve it, which is how we manage to feed the population of the world on the amount of land that we have – through the use of chemical fertilizers and industrialized farming methods, we basically pump more and more energy into the ground, and in return, it gives us more food.

In fact, the energy contained in food these days is often exceeded by the energy that is required to manufacture it. How is this possible? It is because we are quickly depleting the fossil fuel “batteries” that I was talking about earlier. The obvious conclusion from this is that we’re going to run out of batteries and be forced back to an energy budget that is dictated by how efficiently we can harness the renewable energy sources available to us. At the moment, my feeling (and I’m sure there have been studies done on this) is that we wouldn’t be able to cope. Firstly, too many everyday things still require fossil fuels and are not able to substitute anything else (most cars, ships, and all airplanes). Secondly, even if we were to forget about that and assume that everything can be recharged at a power point, I’d bet a lot of money that we still consume far more energy than we can currently extract from renewable sources.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to dedicate as many resources as possible towards increasing the efficiency of renewables to meet our growing energy demands  as well as coming up with solutions for all those situations for which fossil fuels have no easy substitute. Small inroads have been made in the form of electric cars and more energy-efficient appliances, but I’m almost sure that the rate at which our renewable energy capacity is increasing is being outstripped by the rate at which our energy consumption is growing.

As if that alone doesn’t present an almost insurmountable challenge to the current generation, we have the additional problem of climate change. It turns out, that in burning these wonderfully convenient fossil fuels, we release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn disrupts the greenhouse effect and makes the planet hotter overall. Of course, carbon dioxide only makes up 385 parts per million of the atmosphere, but the unprecedented growth of the human footprint on this planet in not only burning fossil fuels, but also deforestation (forests are a significant carbon sink) has meant that that number has increased by over 20% since the industrial revolution began. The reasons why this is bad are covered in detail in The Earth Debate series elsewhere on this website, but suffice to say that the future isn’t looking very bright at the moment.

So with this in mind, I have compiled a short list of a few small things that I would like to fix which I believe will make a significant impact on ensuring that future generations can enjoy this wonderful planet that I grew up on.

Photographs changed the public opinion on the Vietnam War

War

The observant among you will have noticed that the title of this website is “Daniel Yeow and the Quest for World Peace”. I believe that this is still a worthy and significant goal. Perhaps surprising in my analysis of the current state of the planet is that I believe strongly that this is achievable in our lifetimes. Mankind has been at war with itself for as long as people have been capable of killing each other. Strangely enough, one of the periods of time during which we were most optimistic about achieving a lasting world peace was just prior to the first world war, when it was believed that the extent of international trade and globalization meant that warfare no longer made any sense because all parties had so much to lose due to their interconnectedness.

Of course, we all know what happened next. After World War I, the alliance was so vengeful that they subjected Germany to reparations so burdensome that the treaty sealing the end of the first world war effectively guaranteed the second. Out of the second world war emerged the United Nations along with the Bretton Woods institutions. However, since the end of WWII, the number of armed conflicts both between as well as within states has decreased dramatically. There are certainly still areas of tension – North and South Korea, Russia and Georgia, Israel and Palestine to name a few.

So what makes me think that war is on the way out? Photographs. Think about the two world wars for a while, pay special attention to the images that come into your head. Just about every image from those wars that was contemporary with the time period wasn’t seen by anyone until quite long after the still or motion picture was published. Moreover, in a technical sense, it was so difficult to get those images and publish them that it was relatively easy for states to control the flow of information. In the Vietnam war this changed significantly, and images from the conflict, despite the government’s best efforts, turned the tide of public opinion against the war.

Journalistic standards are pretty bad these days, but Keith Rupert Murdoch is 79 years old and even he cannot live forever. The progress of film making technology is such that making documentaries has become easier and cheaper than ever before thereby leveling the playing field, previously dominated only by those who had the backing of the state, or large corporations. One only needs to look at the world of climate change documentaries to sense this leveling effect. Two significant climate change denial documentaries have been made – The Great Global Warming Swindle, and Not Evil Just Wrong. Both were backed by money from conservative, libertarian think tanks or big oil, and despite claims to the contrary, are blatant mouthpieces for those special interest groups. Despite these, and the many baseless attacks made, An Inconvenient Truth still stands above those, as do documentaries made on much lower budgets like The Age of Stupid, and less-directly-aimed documentaries like those produced by the Yes Men.

As information flows more freely and easily (think about Wikileaks) more and more of the general population will be exposed to what war is really like. They will not be insulated from it any more, and this will make it more and more difficult for elected officials to get away with waging war. Many people claim to support the war, while others still confuse supporting the troops with supporting the war, but a fundamental fact remains, and that is that people generally don’t like killing each other. The video “Collateral Murder” released by Wikileaks earlier this year caused such a furore because it showed something that nobody wanted to see – innocent people being killed. It happens in a war, and most people can accept that, but they don’t like it.

As an aside, more of the world’s GDP (GWP?) is spent fighting wars than on anything else. If we could finally end this childish and brutal practice, then we would finally be able to divert a very significant amount of our productivity to solving these pressing problems of preserving our civilization.

Kevin Carter's famous Pulitzer-winning photograph. Carter committed suicide not long after this was taken due to depression.

Poverty

I became concerned with poverty after reading Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty”. So concerned that I ended up at Columbia University sleeping 4-5 hours a night completing a masters degree in the hope that I would learn one or two things which would help me achieve this goal. The reason this problem shot right up my priority list was because I realized that if we were to solve this problem, it would go a very long way to solving a lot of the other problems of the world. Starting at the top of the list, ending poverty would go further towards achieving world peace than ending the small arms trade would.

The “poverty line” in many countries is arbitrarily determined by a number. Even the UN has figures on poverty defined by the number of people who live on less than $1 a day, or $2 a day. Thinking about that for a second, that really isn’t enough to live. True enough, millions of people die in the world every year simply because they are too poor to stay alive. That’s a pretty sobering thought – to imagine that there are people in the world who die because they can’t afford to stay alive, when we hear about people complaining because they can’t afford a new car/iphone/jacket. The implications for that kind of poverty are pretty obvious – if you are given the choice between dying because you’re too poor to stay alive, or killing someone else for the chance to live a little longer, then it might not surprise you that that is exactly what a lot of people do.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to extend this concept to large, organized groups doing it. A lot of idiots from all colours of the political spectrum like to lay the blame on Islamic fundamentalists. While it is certainly true that religious extremists are often the ones who perpetrate crimes of terror, I strongly feel that the reason that the extremists become so extreme has more to do with poverty than with religion. It is a fun hobby of people like Geert Wilders to quote verses from the Koran and label them as inherently violent. Of course, even a cursory glance through world history will show that all religions have experience periods of extremism and committed atrocities in the name of whatever deity they happen to follow. Indeed, one of the most peaceful religions in the world today – Buddhism, is widely believed to be responsible for the invention of martial arts because soldiers would often plunder temples when regional warlords exchanged pleasantries, and the monks got sick of being defenceless and invented self-defence.

What I’m basically trying to say is that if you’ve got a roof over your head, and enough food to eat, you’re very unlikely to want to go out and kill someone. Everyone’s after the same contract – work hard, and be given the means to provide for oneself and one’s family. If that contract cannot be provided, or is broken, then people will feel their lives threatened, and will likely take the matter into their own hands.

The other advantages of ending poverty are numerous. Food security for a family results in less children because the probability of a child surviving into adulthood is greater. The further out of poverty a people can be, the more likely they are to invest in themselves, in the form of infrastructure, and education, which further improves their quality of life and productivity, which in turn increases their ability to dig themselves out of poverty… and so the spiral continues.

The book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, (which is essential reading for anyone who wants to save the world btw) gives some good answers to the question of why some people in some parts of the world became wealthy while other parts of the world have remained in poverty. Simply put, the land that you happen to grow up on has a certain carrying capacity which depends on many factors such as rainfall, soil quality, accessibility of clean water, to name a few. The higher this number, the more likely and the more complex a civilization is likely to develop.

In truth, the development of complex societies around the world was varied and sporadic until quite recently, and reason for this is that the world has become more interconnected. This connectivity has allowed us to spread the inherent risks of depending on a small plot of land for all your food. This way, if a large area were to suddenly have a few years of drought, the society there doesn’t die off completely, but instead is supported by an ally with the understanding that when the situation is switched, they would do the same.

It’s about time we extended this protection to the poorest parts of the world. With the coming unpredictability of climate change, it is not outside the realm of possibility that someday the most impoverished countries in Africa might become the world’s breadbaskets. Equipping them with the infrastructure and knowledge to help themselves benefits both them and us. In truth though, we shouldn’t do this simply because it makes us a little bit better off in the economic equation, or that it increases the overall utility in some whole-earth equation. We should do this because it is the right thing to do.

Although he met an untimely end, his nonviolent "fight" against injustice inspires us to this day

Injustice

Dr Martin Luther King Jr once said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Justice is a funny concept, and one that deserves a lot of thought. Far more thought than this article can realistically contain without going too far off-topic. A common thread in all historically successful civilizations is a strong sense of the rule of law. Hammurabi’s code of laws, one of the earliest examples of codified legal and economic systems has such laws as “If a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant’s daughter shall be put to death.” Most of Hammurabi’s laws end with the accused being put to death, and one would hope that we have developed a more humane way of dealing with injustice in this day and age.

Most, but certainly not all countries have laws which work fairly well. The major advantage of having laws, even if some of them are silly or make no sense, is that it makes things more predictable, and when things are more predictable, then things are easier to plan, and when things are easier to plan, then more can get done. A mature justice system, in particular if it is enforced well, is a pretty sure-fire way to prevent civil conflict.

I find that in general, codes of laws and the legal systems of individual countries are far more well-developed and “just” than the loose sense of international law that exists between countries which still resembles playground politics than anything else. For example, in the middle east (and I’m sure I’m going to cop some criticism for this) you could write entire libraries on why there is always conflict in the area, but what it boils down to is “your brother killed my father, but he’s dead now, so I’m going to kill you”.

Many argue that we should not interfere with the affairs of others, but I think this is a hopelessly naive way of looking at the world. It implies that the actions of people in one country have no effect on those in another, which is demonstratably untrue. As our footprint on the world grows ever larger, we need more than ever to learn how to live together and get along. One of the greatest challenges of international justice is that it is trying to exist in a system of anarchic states with no higher authority to appeal to. It is then left to us to be good neighbours to each other and we’re doing a pretty poor job. As W.H. Auden once said in the concluding lines of a poem on the eve of World War II, “we must love one another, or die”.

So there you go, three little problems that I would like to solve. I’m not too sure how I’m going to go about doing any of these things, but getting a job at a bank isn’t really on the cards (sorry dad). In solving these three, hopefully we’ll be some of the way towards ensuring that a somewhat habitable world will be available to future generations, and the same opportunities that have been available to me in my sheltered, privileged life will be available to everyone. Yeah, I’m a dreamer, but I reckon if everyone in the world dreamed as I did, then it wouldn’t be a dream. I dare you all to imagine a better world.

One of many signs dotted all over Cuba proclaiming the "A Better World is Possible"

“We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box” ~ Robert Fulghum