If you are a parent of a state school pupil in the UK, it is sports day across the country this week. Even though it is already Wednesday, tardily I’ve decided that we’ll focus on sports this week; coming first is not important, it’s the taking part that counts.

Sports day itself presents a variety of hazards for the modern parent. On average you can expect to lose two afternoons of work. Worse still you may get caught in an on-again, off-again spiral caused by the British weather. There is also the obligation to join what can be the life-threatening race between parents that normally concludes proceedings.

It’s no joke. A friend of ours once broke an achilles tendon in the fathers’ sack race. As far as I can recall, it took a good year to heal properly. And there’s worse when you consider the headline on the front page of Peak Performance sports science newsletter that dropped through the mailbox this morning screaming “Why fit athletes suddenly drop dead, and how to stop it happening“. Continue reading ’42 and the meaning of life’

The expression “man-flu” has entered the Collins English Dictionary, according to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning. This seems a good cue to unveil my theory of man-flu, mentioned a few weeks ago.

As you may recall, the theory has received the full support of male evolutionary biologists in exchange for a round of beers. It gets a much more mixed reception from women (particularly academics), admittedly with no alcohol as an inducement, so not an accurate control.

But I think there is a serious evolutionary biological purpose to man-flu, or the exaggerated symptoms that the pair-bonded, male homo urbanis feels when infected by virus. It was designed to make him stay home from the hunt.

When I started attending the Bath University Sports Training Village for physio treatment, I noticed signs everywhere urging athletes to stay away if they had a virus. You would not see that in an office. While the purpose here is primarily competitive, elite athletes are arguably the closest we have to the hunters of our past. Viral infection is devastating to performance in lost training time and risk to health. Continue reading ‘man-flu conquers dictionary’

Knackered Downunder observes a man who tests endurance to the limit

Seeing as the Knackered Hack is losing his faith in marathon running, he’s unlikely to find the example of American endurance runner Dean Karnazes as inspiring as I did.

Karnazes has just finished a tour of Australia and New Zealand, getting in some long-distance running (naturally) and promoting his book Ultramarathon Man, Confessions of an all-night runner. The book is well worth reading. If you walk away with one theme, it’s the value of sheer doggedness and determination and how far they can get you. In Karnazes’ case, it’s literally hundreds of miles. Continue reading ‘ultra-marathon runner tells all’

Believe it or not, resolving the issue of the “chippiness” of your chocolate chip ice cream is an exercise in complexity. There’s a variety of ways to approach it: some good, some bad. The optimum outcome is ensured if the testing panel is represented by different, but relevant, points of view.

Scott Page, Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science and Economics at the University of Michigan, explained in an address to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) in London today how Ben & Jerry’s determined the volume and size of chips in their chocolate chip brand. Laying out a range of options in a large room, the testers placed tubs of rising chip size along one axis, and tubs with an increasing number of chips along the other axis. The grid produced all the various options in between. From a complexity theorist’s point of view, the resultant scores should look like a rugged landscape, with peaks of preference forming across the matrix pointing to the best combination.

But, as Page said, chippiness was only one way of looking at the problem. Continue reading ‘how “chippy” do you like your ice cream?’