Doping in Sport

There seems to be a lot of talk about doping in sport. It is held to be a bad thing. Much talk of cheating by dopers and of clean athletes cheated out of success - all of which may be true.

However there is a lot more wrong with "elite" sport than that. Where to begin? 

Firstly and most obviously the whole shebang is a freak show. Elite sports people are not like you and me. We have nothing in common with them. We do not walk run jump or throw like them, we do not eat sleep drink or live like them. We have little in common with them and they have no impact on our lives apart from the fact that we pay them.  Their lives are artificial, devoted to "training" for intermittent high profile events. They travel to altitude to train for some events so that they will raise the haemoglobin levels in their blood to give them an advantage when they return. Would it not be easier to take an injection to get the same effect - oh no! That would be cheating. They work out like mad to develop stronger muscles. Would it not be better to take some drugs to do the same and use the time saved to do something useful? Oh no! That would be cheating. 

It is a nonsense. Elite sport is a droll farce with nothing to commend it - what on earth does it matter that one person can run any given distance a few fractions of a second quicker that another? In scientific parlance these differences among the top few are insignificant. To this end the athletes are additionally abusing their own bodies - Olympic medallists have a reduced life expectancy compare with normally active people.

We can fix this. We can stop paying for it. Do not attend elite sports events, do not watch it on TV and it will die. We can use the time we save not watching this nonsense by getting out and about a bit more, meeting our fellow men and women, being more active and getting healthier and fitter. Win win all round. Lets do it!

Dubious History

History is a difficult discipline. It requires hard work, dedication to the task and a determinedly disinterested atitude to the subject. History is no calling for writers with a predetermined view of a situation, no ideological comitment, no specific religious or political attachments. The best historians come close to this impossible prescription. There are others. We see major works written by assorted ideologues tendentiously writing accounts of the past seemingly to exculpate the predecessors of their current attachment from any blame. We get instead of history apologetic polemic. The bookshops are littered with their works. Devotees of the political left and right and religious sects of all flavours scribble away and put their misleading work before us. We do well to ignore it. 

A Religious University.

A religious university is an oxymoronic concept.

Internationally, we have, in addition to purely theological colleges dedicated to training priests pastors and the like, a series of "Religious" Universities. We have catholic, presbyterian, baptist, methodist institutions espousing aspects of christianity and there are presumably similar institutions for other religions and sects.

What is the point?

A university must if it is to achieve anything be a haven supporting untramelled structured inquiry into nature in all its stupefying variety. A religious university however is constrained in a myriad of ways large and small by a jacket of dogma. 

"Look into an issue by all means but never forget we already know the answer or at least enough of the surrounding circumstances as to enable us to circumscribe and restrain many of the conclusions you in your error may have come to."

Governments in secular states should stop any flow of funds to such institutions.

Style v Substance

Have you been to the movies lately? I thought not. Movies are a small industry now compared to TV and Computer games. A visit to the cinema helps tell why. The technical quality of movies is unsurpassed. Picture quality is crystal clear and sound quality while at times a bit OTT is sparkling and incisive. So far so good. So what is wrong?  The movies. Movie makers as artists not technicians seem incapable of delivering films which we might wish to see, films which entertain, films which reflect our lives, films which touch our innermost selves. Much of the output is technically superb and artistically awful.  Plenty of science and no art worth sitting through. And so it is across human endeavour. The scientific, technical achievements are massive - excellent hardware but poor content, poor software as it were. And so we "stay away", we lead lives which are unnecessarily impoverished for lack of excellent social or artistic insights. Books, music, films, theatre all suffer when their content is compared with the technical virtuosity that delivers the experience. Science works, sociology and the arts are struggling.

"Modern" Music

This term is used to describe recently composed orchestral or classical music. It has a very small following. For good reasons. It is painful to listen to and demonstrates the fatuity of its composition. All other forms of music have elements that a normal listener can relate to. Not this. It is cacophanous and in places boringly repetitive. The composers are lauded by a small coterie of enthusiasists but as ever in such situations we are left wondering if they wrote this because they could not write anything better. They can fend for themselves but we should spare a thought or the musicians forced into playing this junk. If we all stay away perhaps it will die the death. We can but hope.

Modernity

A term bandied about willy nilly.

What does it mean?

Apart from the purely factual - pertaining to chronologically recent times, events, practices etc.

It seem frequently to convey no more than a set of arrangements or changes of which the writer approves.

Politicians are forever wanting to modernise by which they seem to mean no more than to make changes they prefer.

When you hear of someone wishing to modernise something take a good look and be sure they are not just seeking to further their own advantage. So there!

It is not about the fox!

Again the UK is in paroxysms over the issue of fox hunting. The government, to please some of their support (perhaps not a majority it seems) wishes in effect to overturn the ban and legalise this bizarre spectacle. Those wishing to keep the ban and even see it strengthened go on about the cruelty just as the hunters go on about the need to control fox numbers.
For the record - fox hunting has no significant effect on controlling fox numbers and yes the fox's last minutes are appalling - but worse things happen to people on a regular basis and we seem unwilling enough to address those.
The main argument against fox hunting is not what it does to the fox but what it does to the hunters. Seemingly normal sensible people take to fox hunting and become irrational braying deranged savages. In the interests of mental health let us ban it completely and let the hunters find alternative amusements.

Sociology and Science.

Sociology and Science. 

There never was a credible sociological history of science and  this is its story. A long time  ago a group of  sociologists were employed in a cold northern city to do some journeyman work  tidying up around a team of unruly scientists.  They tired of their labour and took to some intellectual gardening, digging up facts and planting some ideas.  They soon tired  of that and badged themselves as historians.  The rest is history.  They are still at it,  peddling their weary notions as history and continuing to disdain the scientists they were originally employed to assist.  

What went wrong?   In their innocence they that thought history should be a record of "what happened".   When they observed that the  scientists were less than concerned with such detail  they had found their true metier. They would correct the scientists' perceptions, set the record right and save us all from error.  Wrong!  They failed utterly  to note that which is the essence of science and which the  scientists knew full well.  The  central issue of history is not "what happened"  but "what was happening".  There are at least  three reasons for this.  Discovering "what happened"  is all but impossible, it is but a single and thus unrepresentative sample  of what "might have happened"  and it consequently lacks predictive power.  The scientists correctly identified "what was happening" and separated the signal from the noise.  The sociologists failed to notice the important difference in approach and thus all these years later they are still repeating their dreary notions and disdaining the scientists at any given opportunity. What became of the scientists? They changed the world and they gave the sociologist (and the rest of us) most of what they hold dear. But no gratitude in evidence!

Women's Football

The womens World Cup is about to begin. It ought to be an enthralling event. It sadly won't be. Why? The reasons are simple. To understand why it will not entrance we need to understand what aspects of a modern professional game make it so successful. Broadly speaking most modern games are designed around the capabilities of full grown adult males. The game matches their physical capabilities. The simplest example is baseball. Once there was a child's game which morphed (by highly disputed routes) into the game we now enjoy. The  nature of the ball, the bat and the precise size of the pitch fit ideally the capabilities of adult males and create the opportunities for spectacle. Any other group playing the game with the same equipment would fail to enthrall.

And so with football. The ball, the pitch and the goalposts are the ideal size to create just enough opportunities for adult males to give us the spectacle we so much enjoy.

For women playing soccer the pitch, the goalposts and the ball are all too large. The players cannot run fast enough on the full sized pitch, the goalkeepers are not tall enough to defend their goal adequately and the ball is proportionately too large and heavy.

Reduce the sizes of the ball, the goal posts and the pitch and we would have a true rival to the male version of the game.

When it happens remember you read it first here!