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 subtitle of Chris Anderson‘s book The Long Tail is “How endless choice is creating unlimited demand.” Well, I’m a bit hacked off with Amazon — the poster child for long-tail economics. We use Amazon all the time. The problem is that — and not for the first time — something that their online catalogue promises will arrive in one to two weeks, is not coming any time soon. In fact, the size 5 basketball that should now be playing a crucial role in developing the hand-eye coordination and core stability of the Knackered brood, won’t be arriving until November. This, of course, means that in reality it won’t be arriving at all.

It would be nice if Amazon were to admit defeat, or have a slightly better explanation as to why this item is so much more esoteric than Elegance: Exquisite Doily Patterns Charted for Cross-Stitch (Paperback), currently number 986,204 in Amazon’s sales rank.

So, today I am mostly not buying the long-tail argument, unless I can find an alternative supply. Suggestions of UK suppliers would be most welcome.

Commentators often utter clichés in the face of luck, such as: “it is the same for both players.” Soccer commentator Alan Hansen once said something like this in relation to England’s penalty shoot-out in the Euro 2004 tournament, when captain David Beckham missed. It looked to all on the pitch that the ball moved a moment before Beckham struck it. Unfortunately, this possibility was quickly confined to the history books as yet another excuse for a poor England show. But the truth is that Portuguese players then had an advantage as they each ensured the ball was well placed on the apparently damaged penalty spot.

Turning to this week’s record-breakingly rain-drenched Wimbledon, is it the same for both players when the weather interrupts tennis? Continue reading ‘pray for rain, if you’re unfit’

If you live in a competitive family and are a middle child, the news that first-born children are the cleverest is not good. A study conducted at the University of Oslo, and reported in the New Scientist, states that first-borns have an average 2.3 point IQ advantage over their dopey siblings.

I’ve never fancied IQ as a real measure of intelligence. And 2.3 points difference I could probably make up with better nutrition and all this flaxseed oil I’m consuming.

But then that is sort of the point that the Norwegian research is making. That some of the difference in intelligence within families is social, not genetic. It probably results from the fact that parents have more time for the first-born. The older children have been progressively more exposed to the sophisticated vocabulary of the parents. It suggests more powerfully that we should not overstate — as too many people prefer to these days — nature over the complex circumstances of individual nurture, which can produce heavily path-dependent outcomes.

The Knackered parenting experience would bear that out. Continue reading ‘curse of the second-born’