Month: November 2015

Symmetry affects performance

We have 20 papers published as a result of our work on the Jamaican Symmetry Project. We began in 1996 with 285 rural Jamaican boys and girls with an average age of 8. 1 reason we chose rural Jamaica is that it is economically disadvantaged, and since we paid all families we recruited for the study, we got an extraordinarily high participation rate. We measured their symmetry from head to toe, including everything from ear length to foot length to their teeth, we X-rayed their hands. We measured them again for symmetry in 2006.

In 2010, we measured their sprinting speeds and – bingo! – knees stood out. There it was, it was incredible, knee symmetry alone strongly predicted sprinting speed. Not ankles, not feet, nor any other part of the body. If your knees were symmetrical when you were 8 years old, then you ran faster when you were 22 years old. That was true for males and females, and for 90m and 180m sprints alike.

This was such a striking finding that we raised the money to study elite sprinters in Jamaica. They are the best in the world. The same variable we isolated in rural Jamaicans held true for elite athletes. Knee symmetry predicted the best of the best runners. We looked at Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the current top female sprinter in the world, and her knees are so symmetrical we can’t tell them apart.

Ultrasociety

another must read, Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety, How 10 ka of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. This seems like an excellent complement to Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, which I have not managed to get to read, in part because I want to hit Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Yet I’ve read a fair number of Peter’s books (see my 10 questions for him), so I’ll probably be moving this up the stack.

Peter is a serious thinker, and human social complexity and cooperation is an important, and unresolved topic (I am not as sanguine or flip on this David Sloan Wilson).

Parks Without Borders

at least now we’re getting some benefit for all the constant surveillance. as i’ve argued before, it makes fences redundant.

Using design and landscaping strategies—and by subtracting as much as they’re adding—park designers mean to edit and revise a number of parks to better meet their neighborhoods. The program also targets a special site category called “park-adjacent spaces.” These are those vexing parcels that seem to have been forgotten or neglected or excluded by park planners. “Very often we have these dead spaces that are just concrete, sitting there unprogrammed, next to parks. We’re now incorporating these into the parks themselves. We believe ‘park’ is not land for the park but the sidewalk next to the park as well.”

Kane has been found

Athenians and Spartans clashed at the isle of Kane in 406 BC, one of the last battles of the Great Peloponnesian War. Some 100 ships were sent to the bottom of the Aegean Sea as a result of the prolonged, hard-fought naval battle. Archaeologists have long debated the location of Kane, but none of the islands in the Aegean seemed to fit the descriptions. At long last, thanks to artifacts and core samples, the location of Kane has been identified, as has the reason it took so long to find it: It isn’t an island anymore.