The problem with not posting for awhile is that you have no clue where to start to catch up. Suffice it to say that the last month or so has been very hectic. But what brings me back to this space isn’t a desire to catch up or even to muse about the graduate school experience. I wanted to point readers to a very interesting article on the overlap of physics and the Olympics.

There seems to be a little debate over the exact cause, but it appears that runners in the inner lanes on a track are consistently faster than runners in the outer lanes even though lane assignments are done randomly (I should be careful - “random” is a loaded word ’round these parts). This is because those on the inner lanes are closer to the starting gun and have faster reaction times. There’s a little confusion over whether the faster reaction times are due to the longer distance the sound must travel to get to the outer lanes or due to the lesser intensity of the sound when it gets to the outer lanes. Regardless, it’s physics at work! The difference is only around 20 ms, but in some of these sprints, that’s enough to make a difference.

Apparently this isn’t a problem with swimming because the starting noise is played on a speaker behind each swimmer at equal intensities (though perhaps the overlap with neighboring starting platforms differs based on position - especially at the ends). It seems that swimmers understand physics.

Anyway, in non-physics news, my life has been quite busy. I moved into a new apartment and I’ve been traveling all over the northeast. In the past three weeks, I’ve eaten dinner in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. If you map all that out, you may ask, “What did you do? Jump over Connecticut?” Nope, I just stopped for coffee there while passing through.

I do have a musing on the graduate school experience, but I thought physics and track were more interesting for now.