Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Competitive Swimming

Take a look at the swimmers on the Olympic starting blocks. The men are typically about 6ft 5in (2M) tall. This is, for example, the average height of the US Olympic team members, the shortest of whom is one dwarf who is a mere 1.84M tall. I don't know what this is as a percentile of the human population but it must be less than about 2%.

This is entirely predictable according to the laws of hydrodynamics. Whether competitive sport is worth while at all is a question that ought to be questioned more. Is it a good thing for young people to spend some of the best years of their lives churning up and down a swimming pools? That aside, competitive swimming, as presently ordered, is comparable to putting heavyweight boxers in the same ring as featherweights. They have not got a chance. However well anyone trains and develops their technique, they are not going to get anywhere if they are not tall enough. Height is mostly a matter of genetics. And the issue comes into focus even more sharply with juniors. Fast developers do best - a mixture of ten year old children can range from 1.2 to 1.6 metres in height, and the small ones are going to be discouraged and drop out. If anyone does not have two tall parents, they should not even think about competitive swimming.

I doubt if this is what the authorities in charge of the sport actually want, but equally, I doubt if they have given the matter much thought.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...