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400 meter track individual medley

Posted At : August 20, 2008 2:06 AM | Posted By : Emanuel Derman
Related Categories: General
I like swimming and track and field, but why should only swimmers be allowed to traverse the same distance via four different methods, and to be able to get a medal for each one of them?

It would be great to have a different medal for each different method of traversing track too, culminating in the 400 m track individual medley, consisting of

First 100m: Backstride

Second 100m: Crawl (knees and hands alternately touch the ground)

Third 100m: Hop (you can choose your leg, but then the other one can never touch the ground)

Fourth 100m: Freestyle (anyway you like).

It sounds weird, but it's no weirder than triple jump.

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Eyes Shut

Posted At : August 13, 2008 4:12 PM | Posted By : Emanuel Derman
Related Categories: General
Many years ago in the past, while running, I decided to try to shut my eyes and see how many steps I could take at the same pace without actually seeing where I was going. I thought of it as a combination of putting faith in my own capacity to run straight and faith in the universe not to harm me, like some kind of mental/spiritual exercise.

If I'm running on the ring road in Central Park, and there are no people nearby to worry about smashing into, I find I can do ten steps easily, twenty with difficulty, and then I start to get panicky. I imagine I'm going to crash into the sidewalk and trip and fall. I've done forty, but feel very unsafe at that point.

Running on the beach I once did 140 steps, but that's cheating a little, since you can feel the surf at the edge of the sea and know which way is too far left or too far right. But even then, at 100 or so I got mysteriously uneasy.

Somehow, at least for me, it's harder than it seems.

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Almost Everything I Knew About NYC

Posted At : July 30, 2008 2:08 AM | Posted By : Emanuel Derman
Related Categories: General
when I came here came from one source, a fictional one: the novel "Marjorie Morningstar" by Herman Wouk. It's the story of a young Jewish girl (Marjorie Morgenstern) living on CPW in the 1930s and her break-the-bourgeois-rules affair with a pseudo-Bohemian Jewish Cole-Porter-wannabe named Noel Airman (formerly Ehrman). 'Marjorie Morningstar' is the stage name Marjorie hopes to adopt. It ends in the 1950s with the sad triumph of conventionality. But I and my friends read the book several times in high school, and it left a vivid impression of the charms of a romantic bohemian life. In it I discovered the Village, Riverside Drive, the Catskills, summer camps, Broadway, Central Park, the Bridle Path, and so on. It was made into a not very good movie with Natalie Wood, if I remember correctly, and I bet they gave it a happy ending.

One of these days I have to read it again. But thinking about it, I was struck by how literature has changed. In the 1950s and 60s, authors like Herman Wouk and Irwin Shaw wrote really popular best sellers that were good literature. Nowadays, it seems to me, the literary world has fractured into trashy best-sellers and less popular good books.

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