A new study on media coverage of the presidential race suggests “that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama,” the Boston Globe reported yesterday. (…) John McCain, according to a story in Thursday’s Guardian, “didn’t even give the press a chance, trashing it on the assumption that it would be in the tank for Obama.” How did in the tank come to mean supportive?

Aquatics by way of pugilism. In the 19th century, Americans called swimming pools “tanks” and thus “go into the tank” was synonymous with “to dive.” As far back as the 1920s, the phrase “go into the tank” became associated with intentionally losing a boxing match by diving onto the canvas and pretending you’ve been knocked out—a sense perfectly illustrated by this sentence from a 1928 New York Times article: “Pansy came out of jail and his manager, thinking him ‘all washed up,’ signed him up to ‘take a dive,’ or, more technically, ‘to go into the tank’ for a bird named Sailor Gray.”

By the mid-20th century, go into the tank, in the sense of rolling over for someone in a rigged contest, extended into political usage. Thus in 1960, syndicated columnist Bob Ruark set up a boxing metaphor to describe the run-up to that year’s presidential conventions: “I am having a tiny touch of difficulty with the American news lately, having gotten it slightly mixed up with the prize-fighting business. But if I read it right, the presidential nomination conventions have been bagged in advance … with all the other competitors rigged to go into the tank for Jolting Jack Kennedy and Richard the Ripper Nixon.”

While taking a dive still refers to self-sabotage, the meaning of go into the tank gradually shifted toward working on someone’s behalf, often with the hint of backroom deals or at least inappropriate devotion.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Sugar Ray Leonard }

Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances. (…)

The standard explanation among physical anthropologists has long been that early hominids left life in the trees to forage on the open savanna and that walking upright was the key to surviving in that new environment. Bramble and Lieberman do not dispute this general theory, but they have identified a suite of traits in the human anatomy that add a dramatic twist to the story line.

The traits appear to be specifically adapted for running—and for jogging for long distances. So Bramble and Lieberman were not at all surprised that a man won the Man Versus Horse Marathon. It fits their hypothesis. Unlike many mammals, not to mention primates, people are astonishingly successful endurance runners, “and I don’t think it’s just a fluke,” Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners.

{ Discovery Magazine | Continue reading }

cartoon { ad for Blair Hair Replacement, HX Magazine | NSFW }

On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits.

A paper published this month in Psychological Science reports that referees and umpires subconsciously favor competitors in red uniforms. The experiment was clever: the scientists showed 42 experienced tae kwon do referees video clips of five different male competitors. Each clip featured one athlete in red and another athlete in blue. At first, the referees were shown the original videos, and asked to score the match. Then, they were shown the same clips but with the colors digitally swapped, so that the athlete originally wearing red was now wearing blue. This single alteration had a significant impact on the outcome, with competitors dressed in red scoring, on average, 13 percent more points than their opponents in blue.

{ The Frotal Cortex/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

Chinese officials have admitted deceiving the public over another highlight of the Olympic opening ceremony: the picture-perfect schoolgirl who sang as the Chinese flag entered the stadium was performing to another girl’s voice. (…)

Officials have already admitted that the pictures of giant firework footprints which marched across Beijing towards the stadium on Friday night were prerecorded, digitally enhanced and inserted into footage beamed across the world.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

The most famous swimmer among the English poets, Lord Byron, wrote a jaunty poem on the activity—one of the many activities—that made him legendary throughout Europe in his lifetime. (…)

The man who swam, after a night of revelry on the Lido, across the lagoon and up the Grand Canal in Venice in three and three-quarters hours, took to the water for the same reason that he took so easily to horseback: he could do anything but walk normally. Swimming hid a congenital deformity and allowed him to forget it temporarily. Cursed with a clubfoot, for which he always blamed his mother, Byron became both the beau ideal of the Romantic lover and a classic case of an overcompensator. (…)

With Byron, swimming really enters English literature.

{ The American Scholar | Continue reading }

On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then — somehow — the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water’s surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot — and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

How do they do it?

Well, there’s a rope. There’s a pulley. And the rope and the pulley work a contraption made out of a pipe. The whole gizmo is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan by the name of Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

related { Professor Tim Wei talks about his flow research with the U.S. Olympic Swim Team | video }

related { The Secrets of Synchronized Swimming }

If you watch CNN, you probably think that the most important issue hovering over the Beijing Olympics as we count down to the opening ceremonies has to do with air quality, or potential protests, or internet censorship.

All of those things make great copy, to be sure. But if you look carefully through the haze, you begin to discern the looming outlines of problems that, while perhaps less newsworthy, are more fundamental to the Olympic movement and the companies that spend tens of millions to support it.

1. Does Olympic sponsorship — with its huge upfront fees, restrictive conditions, political sideshows, and the growing number of sponsors and “partners” competing for attention — offer the kind of return on investment our business now demands of campaigns?

Four out of twelve global sponsors — including Lenovo and Kodak — will not be back after 2008, according to BusinessWeek. Will this year’s sponsors do as well as they had dared to hope? I mean, really, 12 logos on a billboard? (…)

In short, the real issues here in Beijing are not about Beijing at all. They are about the Olympics themselves. More than any other time since the Montreal Olympics of 1976, the economic model that has sustained the Olympics since Los Angeles in 1984 is under threat, and the IOC is quietly worried.

{ AdAge | Continue reading }

photo { Erin Wasson photographed by Todd Selby | via Photoshelter }

‘Everyone is an artist.’ — Joseph Beuys (Actually, Novalis, not Beuys, was the first to say ‘everyone is an artist.’)

Both were wrong.

Not even every artist is an artist.

Athletes are turning to a new performance enhancing drug: Viagra. Traces of the drug, which is intended to alleviate sexual dysfunction, are increasingly appearing in the testing of samples from sports competitors.

It has become so widespread that the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is considering whether to include Viagra in its list of substances banned in international sports.

Christiane Ayotte, head of a Wada-accredited laboratory in Montreal, said she regularly identifies Viagra and Cialis, a similar product, in the urine of male sports competitors. No action is taken because it is not illegal.

{ Time | Continue reading }

{ Helmut Smits, Football stadium, 2002 | fruit crate boxes, fruits, wood, stands, halogen work lights, grass carpet }

{ Kellie Everts, bodybuilding pioneer, photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, Playboy, May 1977 | Enlarge: 1/2/3 }