Time for updated clocks?

"Only 0.12 separated the top eight skiers one of the tightest finishes in alpine ski history."

posted by the red terror at 01:48 PM - reply - flag:

Australian V8 Supercars already use timing to four decimal places, so ten thousandth of a second. F1 has used timing to the thousandth for over 20 years. Can't understand why they haven't adopted it in all timed sports. Do the timing companies charge more for more accuracy?

posted by Drood at 02:37 PM - reply - flag:

The more accuracy the better...as a scientist I find that the closer my measurements are, the better the data...and if we have the technology to do so, then hells yeah, we should use it... It could be ALL the difference between a medal and a 4th place finish...

posted by chemwizBsquared at 01:42 AM - reply - flag:

I was asking this question during the olympics. And then I was asking, if everyone in the top ten of an event is within a couple hundredths of a second of one another, can you really say any one of them is better than any other? In the case of downhill skiing, maybe the fourth plave finisher ran into a slight breeze, or a tiny bump left by the last racer. I think at that level of detail, winning or losing is beyond human control. It's not necessarily the athletes you are measuring, it's circumstance. Still, you gotta measure something, right?

posted by fabulon7 at 07:04 PM - reply - flag:

But don't confuse precision and accuracy. Just because you make your clocks more precise doesn't mean that you can actually measure the time on the course to a thousandth or a ten-thousandth of a second. If that last digit is just random noise, then you aren't measuring anything; you're just giving the illusion of a measurement.

posted by Amateur at 07:40 PM - reply - flag:

I think at that level of detail, winning or losing is beyond human control. It's not necessarily the athletes you are measuring, it's circumstance. It's interesting, though. In the luge/bobsleigh, the margins are incredibly slim, and yet appear to be repeatable. They run four heats, and the same guy wins all four by a few hundredths of a second -- or maybe 1st,2nd,2nd,1st. That suggests that it is not random, and that you can actually measure these small differences between the athletes (or their sleds, but that's a different issue). Alipine skiing is quite different. I bet if you ran the same downhill course thirty times in a month, you would get twenty different podiums. So even though the margins are bigger, the 'random chance' factor is higher.

posted by Amateur at 07:50 AM - reply - flag:

Saturday, March 04, 2006

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