Shots in the Dark

I love it when friends/blog-readers send me items that they think I’d like to post, or just should be posted. Seriously. They’re usually pretty interesting, sometimes pretty funny.

Here’s one article sent to me by a friend who reads Slate. It’s about why Jamaicans are so fast. Some of their speed due to genetics!

70 percent of Jamaicans have the “strong” form of the ACTN3 gene—which produces a protein in their fast-twitch muscle fibers that has been linked to increased sprinting performance. That’s a significantly higher percentage than in the United States, where about 60 percent have the gene variant.

Isn’t it fascinating the way that science is gradually, inexorably trumping politics in this discussion of why various people do various things better than other people do?

Another friend sent me this story about a man who is suing a Chicago restaurant, saying that its undercooked salmon gave him a 9-foot tapeworm. (My friend kindly wished the same on me.)

He later passed the giant parasite…

The man wants $100k, which seems not nearly enough….

According to the Web site mayoclinic.com, tapeworms can measure up to 50 feet long….

In the Sun, Steve Goldman thinks so.

….the Yankees would have to play at close to a 110-win pace to catch the Red Sox for the wild card if the latter played only .500 baseball for the rest of the season, and that assumes that one of the White Sox and Twins aren’t in the mix as well.

This isn’t how the Yankees pictured their last season in Yankee Stadium, that’s for sure. An inconsistent, sometimes bad team. Wounded stars both young and old. A once-promising centerfielder, Melky Cabrera, having to be sent to the minors after three years in the big leagues. Losing the division not just to the Red Sox, but to the Tampa Bay Rays. Derek Jeter in decline, prompting debate over whether the Yankees should let him go at the expiration of his current contract. A-Rod and Madonna. A-Rod and an unidentified woman in Florida. A-Rod and…a sub-.250 batting average with men in scoring position. (Let’s hope he does better on his nights out.)

So here are my hopes for the rest of the season.

I’d like Mike Mussina, who has never won 20 games in his career, to hit that mark. I’d like Joba Chamberlain to return pain-free (as every baseball fan should; the man is a pleasure to watch pitch). I’d like Mariano Rivera to stop choking in non-save situations, Derek Jeter to finish at .300, rookie Brian Gardiner to continue to show promise, and Bobby Abreu and Hideki Matsui to call it a career. I’d also like Jorge Posada’s arm to heal. And Phil Hughes to return healthy.

I’d also like Carl Pavano to pitch in a game, just for the fun of it.

Oh, and most important—I’d like the Rays or the Angels to kick some Red Sox butt.

ART has a new director, Diane Paulus. She sounds quite cool. Nice website, too.

It’s getting harder and harder to defend John Edwards.

The Times reports:

…Mr. Edwards’s political action committee went to unusual lengths to make a final $14,000 payment to Ms. Hunter’s film company months after its contract with the committee had ended. The payment was issued while the committee was short on cash and could pay its bills only after receiving thousands of dollars from Mr. Edwards’s presidential campaign and donations from four people, including Mr. Baron’s wife.

Furthermore, a woman who helped Ms. Hunter create a Web site on New Age spirituality in 2006 says she regularly corresponded with her about a married North Carolina man named John whom Ms. Hunter was dating in March of that year, if not earlier. Mr. Edwards has said his affair with Ms. Hunter did not begin until after she had started doing video work for his political action committee months later.

It’s such a cliche, but the cover-up is almost always worse than the crime….

They faked the fireworks and the singing child at the opening ceremony.

Now they’ve won the gymnastics gold with one competitor so young she’s missing a tooth. Are the Chinese cheating?

Leading up to the Olympics, some official Chinese sports registration lists in China suggested that half of the Chinese women’s team did not meet the age requirement of turning 16 in 2008.

…He Kexin, Yang Yilin, Jiang Yuyuan may be as young as 14, according to some on-line lists, which have now been blocked or have disappeared completely….

Several weeks after you read about it on this blog, the (NY) Times reports on the LA Council’s vote to impose a moratorium on fast-food restaurants in some poor LA neighborhoods.

Here’s the article’s lede, emphasis added:

A NEW weapon in the battle against obesity was rolled out last month when the Los Angeles City Council decided to stop new fast food restaurants from opening in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Editorial laziness like this makes me think the Times really does need new ownership.

The former Harvard president spoke at a Cape Cod fundraiser for Barack Obama…

Then, it was Larry Summers’ turn to speak. In casual attire, he was articulate and forceful. He did not mince words. “The future course of this country in economics is in peril. This is the worst time since the Great Depression. We are in a recession now. Are we going to rebuild or cut taxes for the wealthy? Credit card abuses are part of the problem. Consumers need to be protected. The way to do that is to have a Democratic President and Congress,” he said.

In a post below, Standing Eagle chastises me for suggesting that the Elvisian piano player at the Olympics opening ceremony was “key-synching.”

Whichever one of us is right—and just for the record, it’s me—here is something from the opening ceremony that, it turns out, was definitely faked.

Remember watching those incredible fireworks “footprints” that marched across Beijing before winding up at the Bird’s Nest? The ones that I said looked like missile tests?

Fake!

…what [we] were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment…

…Gao Xiaolong, head of the visual effects team for the ceremony, said it had taken almost a year to create the 55-second sequence. Meticulous efforts were made to ensure the sequence was as unnoticeable as possible: they sought advice from the Beijing meteorological office as to how to recreate the hazy effects of Beijing’s smog at night, and inserted a slight camera shake effect to simulate the idea that it was filmed from a helicopter.

Pretty sneaky! (As this blogger previously noted: the first digital Olympics.)

And here’s an interesting question: Did NBC know, and if so, shouldn’t it have said something? If the network didn’t know, that means the Chinese duped a television network with an elaborate stunt that involved providing them with a fake digital feed so technically impressive that the US couldn’t tell real from fake.

Hmmm…I wonder if all this stuff could be useful in the authoritarian control of hundreds of millions of people….?

(Photo of Fake Fireworks from the Telegraph)

An e-mailer wrote asking for details on an offhand reference I’d made in a post to some technical issues while on a dive in Bali, at Menjangan. The correspondent was curious to know what happened and suggested I post about the incident.

So…I do so because it’s actually a textbook case of how something can go wrong on a dive.

It was the first dive of the day on a reef off the northwest corner of Bali, in between Bali itself and a tiny island just off the coast. Max depth was about 70 feet. There were five of us on the boat: my friend Greg Widen, a Swedish guy named Michael, a driver, and the divemaster, a Japanese woman whose name I don’t recall.

Two problems: The divemaster spoke very little English, and we were using rented equipment from a source we didn’t know.

Dropping down was easy and lovely; straight off the bat we saw four reef sharks. As we progressed along the reef to a sandy bottom, the dive got increasingly interesting; at around 20 meters we passed through a garden of eels, waving from the sand like tall grass, but slowly retreating into the sand if one got too close. Hundreds, if not thousands, of the eels. Gorgeous.

But after about twenty minutes, as my air tank got lighter (from me consuming air), I noticed that I was having trouble staying at depth; I was too light. Almost immediately after that recognition, I started rising to the surface. We had come to slightly shallower water, maybe 40 feet, the air in my BC was expanding, and suddenly, whooosh, I was soaring upward. Absolutely nothing I could do about it; as I tried to release the air from my BC, nothing happened. The release valve was busted.

I broke the surface about fifteen seconds later.

This is, of course, a very fine way to get the bends, though thankfully I wasn’t so deep that that was particularly likely.

Greg and Michael continued on; I was behind them, and they had no idea that I was now above them. The divemaster did see what had happened, and she surfaced as well. I tried to explain with her that my BC wasn’t working; she fiddled with another valve in the back of the jacket and let the air out. “You dive again?” she asked. I nodded—sure, what the heck—and she pushed me down. We caught up to Greg and Michael, who’d gone forward, having no idea what was happening—also not such a great idea on a dive. If you lose sight of the divemaster, you should really hang out and wait.

About two minutes later, the same thing happened again. Down about 30 feet, I shot to the surface as if someone was reeling me in. The divemaster followed me up again, but I wasn’t going to take a third chance; she whistled for the boat, which was a couple hundred yards away, and I pumped some air into my BC so that I could float at the surface.

Except that after I released the air injection button, the air kept flowing, and my BC tightened around me like a blood pressure cuff. Not so great. But after I clicked the valve up and down, it finally stopped. The divemaster released all the air from the back again, and I simply had to swim for a minute or so with no air in my BC and all my gear on until the boat arrived. Don’t try that at home.

So the moral of the story is: Try not to use rented equipment if you don’t know the source, and language barriers between divers and divemasters are bad.

One final point: The e-mailer mentioned that his son doesn’t like to dive unless it’s over 100 feet (I think that was the number mentioned). This seems silly to me. Unless you’re looking for pelagic life, there’s simply not that much to see past a certain depth. (Consider, for example, Belize’s Blue Hole.) My deepest dive was 150 feet and I loved it—I got a little narced, which is a nice feeling—but that’s too far down for the sun’s rays to penetrate, meaning that there’ll be less life on the reef, and fewer critters feeding on that life.

E-mailer, your son strikes me as being a little macho, which is actually something to look out for. Half the serious accidents in diving that I hear about stem from guys who want to show off how deep they can go or how great their fancy new equipment is…..