Is this Zeno revisited?

[Drooper]

MAKE a note for your descendants: the 2156 Olympics will be the one to watch, for it may well mark the first time in human history that women will overtake men as the fastest runners on the planet.

That's the confident prediction of British scientists who have plotted the times for the Olympic 100 metres since 1900 and say a century of ever-improving athletic prowess in this discipline is set to continue.

Fastest human 'will be a woman'

I think is an example of the Zeno paradox.

What does everybody else think?

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

I think it is an example of misapplied extrapolation, combined with the mistake of trying to interpret data without making use of what we already know about human physiology.

Take any smooth curve. Zoom in on it close enough, and you get what looks like a straight line. That linear model works great for interpolation, and even for extrapolation that is made over a range that is small compared to the range used to get the linear model.

These people have data from 100 years, and are using a linear fit to extrapolate 150 years into the future. That is just plain bad math. There is no way that their estimate of the second derivative has small enough error bars for an extrapolation that far out to be meaningful.

Furthermore, physiology clearly indicates that those are not straight lines. That in fact they will saturate to some asymptotic level, and that the saturation point will be lower for women than for men.

A more reasonable interpretation of their data would be that since the straight line fits will intersect in 150 years, and since we can be pretty sure that saturation will occur before that intersection can happen, that we can predict that the linear trend is not going to last much longer.


Dr. Stupid

 

[wollery]

Oh my....


What a bunch of morons!!!

It seems to have escaped their notice that 100 years ago not only did women not train, they virtually never ran, and when they did they did so in heavy skirts! That women have improved faster over the past 100 years (76 actually, since the first womens 100 metres was in 1928) is due to the fact that they started to run in more appropriate clothing and to train properly.

I'd also point out that it's impossible for the times to always keep improving, because then they'd eventually get down to really ridiculous times. I mean, do they really believe that it's possible for a human to run the 100 metres in 1 second? 5 Seconds?

These people give science a bad name!

 

[drkitten]

I'd also point out that it's impossible for the times to always keep improving, because then they'd eventually get down to really ridiculous times. I mean, do they really believe that it's possible for a human to run the 100 metres in 1 second? 5 Seconds?

Of course it's possible -- the linear extrapolation says that it's true! I'm looking forward to the era when both men and women routinely run the 100m in negative time, myself.

 

[wollery]

Of course it's possible -- the linear extrapolation says that it's true! I'm looking forward to the era when both men and women routinely run the 100m in negative time, myself.

 

[patnray]

What wollery said. Blind interpolation without any attempt to find reasons for apparent trends.

Plus there is a reason these short races, which used to be timed to tenths of seconds, are now timed to hundredths of seconds. We are unlikely to see a world record beaten by several tenths of a second. Improvements will come in increments of hundredths of a second...

 

[Hellbound]

To paraphrase from Scott Adams (on the subject of following hte current trend):

This reasoning is not always valid. For example, let's take a puppy. Following the current trend, the puppy will continue to grow until, in a fit of uncontrollable happiness, it wipes out a major metropolitan area.

 

[Quixote]

In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain, from Life on the Mississippi, 1884.