[HN Gopher] How Olympic Timing Works
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How Olympic Timing Works
Author : histories
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-08-07 13:18 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (entertainment.howstuffworks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (entertainment.howstuffworks.com)
| tedunangst wrote:
| > They decided that any start less than 0.04 seconds after a
| teammate tags the wall is a false start
|
| This appears to be regurgitating a source that misread the
| primary material. The differential is actually -0.04s. I.e.,
| before they touch the wall.
|
| https://swimming.ca/content/uploads/2015/05/chief-judge-elec...
|
| https://resources.fina.org/fina/document/2022/02/08/77c3058d...
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Fun fact: swimming records times are rounded to the hundreds of a
| second, because recording more precise times would require too
| high of a tolerance on the length of the pool at construction. I
| wonder if it's the same for some other sports!
| whycome wrote:
| Do they verify the track lengths for sprints?
| votepaunchy wrote:
| > rounded to the hundreds of a second
|
| As below, this is why the metric system is superior.
| Centiseconds vs hectoseconds makes it much easier to see the
| mistake.
| stavros wrote:
| I've never seen the "hecto-" prefix before, but I immediately
| have an undying hatred for it. "Hecto-" means "a sixth of",
| "hecato-" means "a hundredth of". Sucks that people chose the
| wrong spelling because they didn't realize it changes the
| meaning so much.
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| The hecto- prefix isn't commonly used for durations, but
| it's often used for barometric pressures as in hPa
| (Hectopascal), or areas such as ha (Hectare), at least in
| Europe. And it is an official SI prefix.
| stavros wrote:
| This is all true, but I still hate it for being wrong :/
| throwaway99113 wrote:
| It is sometimes used in grocery stores in Norway when you
| need to ask for a quantity of something that is not pre-
| packed.
|
| "I'd like 2 hecto ham" means 2 hectograms (200g, or 0.2kg)
|
| It may sound strange if you are not used to it. I also have
| a feeling that the younger generations prefer just
| measuring in grams when it is less than a kg. Let's blame
| the school system ;-)
|
| We also sometimes measure area as "dekar" (1000 sq m) and
| "hektar" (10000 sq m)
| ianburrell wrote:
| The dictionary says that "hecto" is hundreth "from French
| hecto-, from Ancient Greek ekaton (hekaton, "hundred")." It
| was sometimes spelled "hecato" in 19th century.
|
| In English, "hexa" is the prefix for sixth from the Greek
| "hex".
| stavros wrote:
| Certainly; I'm merely suggesting English is wrong.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| In thousands of a second, you could gain an advantage by
| growing long fingernails to touch the wall fractionally
| earlier.
| euroderf wrote:
| At the possible cost of increased water resistance,
| and/versus possible increase in power of stroke.
|
| Sounds like fertile ground for a Ph.D thesis that sparks a
| nail craze.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| >and note that it takes 300 to 400 microseconds for an eye to
| blink
|
| Anyone with at least half a brain knows this is ridiculously
| fast. Thats obviously incorrect
| seaal wrote:
| Forgive us Americans and being bad at metric. I personally
| wouldn't have noticed the mistake, but I only have two brain
| cells.
|
| For other dummies, it should be milliseconds (1000x difference)
| vultour wrote:
| 400ms seems way too long for a blink. 300us is obviously
| wrong though.
| moritzruth wrote:
| According to Wikipedia:
|
| > The duration of a blink is on average 100-150 milliseconds
| according to UCL researcher and between 100 and 400 ms
| according to the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinking
| jprete wrote:
| GP quoted "microseconds" i.e. 1000x smaller.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Maybe it was intended to mean the time between neurological
| impulse to blink and the physical eyelid moving? Still, yeah,
| original text seems misleading.
|
| The 100-200 milliseconds duration of a blink was often cited in
| web development circles in the late 90s / early '00s, that I
| sometimes forget it isn't a widely known fact.
| spiralganglion wrote:
| They have a link to a source for that claim... and the source
| says 300 to 400 milliseconds. So whoever wrote and edited the
| OP article just messed this up.
| ec109685 wrote:
| What kind of crazy camera can distinguish a torso crossing the
| line?
|
| > When the leading edge of each runner's torso crosses the line,
| the camera sends an electric signal to the timing console to
| record the time.
|
| I believe it's up to the judge to place the "crossing" line at
| the appropriate spot.
|
| https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=4423f7...
| xcskier56 wrote:
| This is why you'll see the finish times in track move a little
| bit from the immediate unofficial time to the final time. A
| computer selects which frame was the finish and then someone on
| the timing crew will move the "line" a bit to exactly capture
| the correct time. This allows for instantaneous times and then
| correct final times
| ggambetta wrote:
| Wondering if it would make more sense to award shared
| gold/silver/bronze to athletes whose times fall within a certain
| distance of each other. The difference between 10.00 and 10.01 is
| much smaller than the difference between "gold" and "silver".
|
| Put it another way, both (10.00, 10.01) and (10.00, 20.00) map to
| (gold, silver), despite being qualitatively very different.
| frou_dh wrote:
| That kinda conflicts with the psychology of motivation for
| elite-level training, where they know/feel there'll be a reward
| for putting in that extra training effort to be a tiny sliver
| better on the day.
| omoikane wrote:
| I have a similar opinion, where if the difference comes down to
| milliseconds and race comes down to who has a longer fingernail
| or who has a thicker torso, I am not sure those were the
| attributes that the athletes were meant to compete on.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| On my phone (Firefox on Android) this page hijacks the back
| button and gesture. Not nice.
| oulipo wrote:
| It feels a bit sad to see that the "best athletes" are "ranked"
| as gold, silver, bronze, when often their performance is globally
| equivalent (when you run 100m at full-speed and you come at 0.01s
| of each other, you basically run the exact same speed)
|
| It's a kind of weird society of competition we're building... I
| prefer flowers and gardening, reading and debating
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > I prefer flowers and gardening, reading and debating
|
| We can have both.
| mrfox321 wrote:
| These people want to win. It's not just society wanting to
| define winners.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to watch or care about the Olympics. You
| chose to read the article and comment on it.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Ads. Ads are forcing me to care about the Olympics. Peer
| pressure forces me to watch the Olympics to know what people
| are talking about.
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| > Ads are forcing me to care about the Olympics.
|
| Are they? At worst they force you to notice that the
| olympics are going on.
|
| > Peer pressure forces me to watch the Olympics to know
| what people are talking about.
|
| Talk about something else with these people if the olympics
| don't interest you...
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| I don't control other people's topics of conversation.
|
| You're correct, they force me to notice over and over
| again.
| matwood wrote:
| When you're at the extreme ends of performance as Olympic
| athletes are, progress happens in tiny increments. .01s here
| and there add up over time until the limits of humanity are
| reached.
| mintone wrote:
| The article states that "They scan an image through a thin slit
| up to 2,000 times a second", whereas it has been widely reported
| that it is actually 40,000 times a second[1]
|
| The article probably wasn't wrong, for when it was first written.
| This is a curious internet thing - this article is a decade old
| and has been updated incrementally to keep it somewhat relevant,
| however because it's about tech that keeps advancing it ends up
| being a misleading source.
|
| If you look at all of the sources, they're from January 2014 but
| because the article is undated it leads you to think it's is
| correct. It's an interesting problem. An old textbook is clearly
| an old textbook, but a website can just have modern CSS applied,
| dates removed and there is no apparent guide to the freshness of
| the article. Internet problems.
|
| [1] https://www.axios.com/2024/08/05/noah-lyles-wins-gold-
| track-...
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| Interestingly, it isn't really Omega, Longines, Tissot,
| Blancpain, Certina and the like that do the timing, but a small-
| ish company named "Swiss Timing", which is part of Swatch Group,
| as are the above mentioned companies [0]. It doesn't sell watches
| though, so marketing that name doesn't make much sense.
|
| The brands that are displayed are part of the same group, and do
| indeed sell watches, and therefore are printed on the equipment.
|
| They were the result of a merger when the Swiss watchmakers got
| afraid of growing sales of Japanese watches, especially Seiko
| [1].
|
| [0]: https://www.swatchgroup.com/en/companies-
| brands/electronic-s...
|
| [1]: https://codefabrik-static-various.s3.eu-
| central-1.amazonaws.... (PDF, 304kB)
| xcskier56 wrote:
| Yep! And a slight oddity is that at least the group I've worked
| with at Swiss timing is primarily Germans. I worked with them
| for XC Skiing events but I think they are also the ones who do
| track. There are multiple teams within Swiss timing that focus
| on different sports
| Moon_Y wrote:
| Technological advancements have led to precise timing. Compared
| to ten or twenty years ago, technology nowadays is truly much
| more advanced.
| sam_goody wrote:
| What this article doesn't explain are the ambiguous ways of
| crossing the line - if a cyclist leans forward and their nose
| crosses before the front of their tire, from where is it
| measured? How about their hat? If a runner's belly is larger than
| their torso (OK, unlikely) does that count?
|
| I have seen some articles discussing this during the last
| olympics, and remember thinking how much more impressive it made
| the job of measuring completion.
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(page generated 2024-08-11 23:01 UTC)