Modern journalism at its finest once again.
William Saletan has a (risible) piece up at Slate challenging the Olympic 100m butterfly victory of Michael Phelps.
Sorry, but none of these assurances holds water. The scoreboard doesn't tell you which swimmer arrived, touched, or got his hand on the wall first. It tells you which swimmer, in the milliseconds after touching the wall, applied enough force to trigger an electronic touch pad. As to whether Phelps touched first, there's plenty of unresolved doubt.
The human eye, in real time and basic video replay, suggests Cavic won. But that could be an optical illusion. Cavic takes one big stroke toward the wall, then glides to it with fingers extended. Phelps does the opposite: He shortens his stroke so he can squeeze in one more truncated stroke. He gambles that the speed he gets from the extra launch will make up for the additional time it requires. Cavic leads but closes the distance to the wall slowly; Phelps trails but closes the distance fast. In ultraslow-motion replays, it looks as though Cavic has reached the wall while Phelps is still closing. But these replays break down Cavic's glide to such short increments that you can't really tell whether he has stopped.
I'm kinda speechless here.
Because even media-disconnected me managed to get to see the Sports Illustrated (yeah, not a mainstream magazine that big-time journalists like Saletan might have looked at in doing his research...) spread on the finish?
Remind me again why I'm supposed to take mainstream journalists seriously?
Seriously,. the problem with trivial stories like this one is that it cracks the mantle of credibility that the journalists need - because it's really the only thing they have to sell.
I read Saletan this morning and I almost did a Raisin Bran spit-take all over my laptop. (Hmmm...that sounds vaguely dirty.) His argument comes down to saying he can more accurately judge the difference of 1/100 of a second sitting on his sofa at home than the electronic equipment designed for that measurement in the pool itself.
He probably doesn't believe we landed on the moon either.
And in any case, if the rule (de facto) says that the winner is the first one to apply enough pressure to the pad, Phelps is still the winner.
Saletan counts as mainstream media now? I thought he was pretty firmly web-ghetto. Slate certainly is.
Yah, anyone vaguely familiar with the refractive properties of water should be immediately skeptical of a visual inspection of the finish. Add to that the limitations of vide: 30 frames per second for a 1/100th of a second finish... thats .03 f/s seconds resolution vs .01 seconds of dispute,making it impossible to detect the winner. Unless you're watching high def ;)
And FabioC is correct, the object of the event is to trigger the touchpad. Otherwise following Saletens argument to its absurdist conclusion you get down to a molecular level and quantum uncertainty, there is no way to determine even in principle which wavefronts collided first. All we can tell is which device triggered first, which for any sane human being is close enough to certain to get them through the day. The other way lies madness.
Following Salatens' argument to its natural conclusion, Hillary Clinton won the primaries.
Mark B, according to at least one account I read, these images are made with special equipment at 3000 fps.
"...Hillary Clinton won the primaries."
And Gore won in 2000.
And Kerry won in 2004, after Ohio votes were stolen.
And Saddam had no WMDs, despite using them years before.
Lastly, didn't Dara Torres also lose her race by 0.01 seconds? Why isn't this 'journalist' making the same argument when it is an American losing by 0.01 seconds?
since when is fabrication argument? this is simply a classic case of trolling, of course the MSM shouldn't troll, but it has been my experience that they have perfected the art.
Go over and look at the Fray - the commenters are being kind of - frank - with him...
A.L.
Ughh, i stumbled on a Truther thread over there. I'm gonna be angry and nausious all night. Faith in humanity, dwindling...
For the record, and my own mental state- the fact that jet fuel burns (a fuel air mixtures explodes technically) in jet engines without melting them does not imply that burning jet fuel cant collapse a skyscraper. Good lord how can people spend so much energy searching for idiotic conspiracy minutia and so little on the simple mechanics of what they are arguing.
Refraction is not an issue if the camera's are underwater. And, I sorta assumed that they used high speed cameras. Maybe that's a bad assumption?