I love this video.
This one is also good :-) Check out the guy who won't tap and is choked completely out. I've done this to other people but I'm a quick tapper so it's never happened to me.
I think in my mid to late 20's prime I could have beaten up any other theoretical physicist in the world in a fight ;-) But those days are gone!
Did you ever practice judo with Brian Greene? (And who among today's "mid to late 20's" theoretical physicists practices MMA or semething like it?)
ReplyDeleteRe: Brian, no, I never did. I don't know any physicists who train MMA or BJJ, but there must be some.
ReplyDeleteThere are at least a few who wrestled in college. At UO there was a grad student who had been a pretty good 197 pounder in college and I wouldn't want to have to fight him (we used to train together sometimes). But he's not a theorist ;-)
Re: Brian, no, I never did. I don't know any physicists who train MMA or BJJ, but there must be some.
ReplyDeleteThere are at least a few who wrestled in college. At UO there was a grad student who had been a pretty good 197 pounder in college and I wouldn't want to have to fight him (we used to train together sometimes). But he's not a theorist ;-)
the crossfit video is a nice demonstration of the importance of natural athletic talent. despite being trained using totally sub-optimal methods, johnson is still doing well.
ReplyDeleteAs a tangent, I think most people would be surprised at what regular, consistent training for several years of their lives, optimal or slightly sub-, revealed about their own athleticism.
ReplyDeleteSorry, no time here to look into the data. A student here did suggest that at least the "Jewish" column of the data may be unreliable, because the count of stereotypically Jewish names (Goldstein, Cohen, and the like) was used as a proxy (and then multiplied by some factor to account for less ethnically-marked surnames), and there are few enough Olympiad and Putnam winners that the resulting errors can be significant. For example, he claimed to know a counterexample to the claim that there were 0% Jews among the 2011 Putnam winners.
ReplyDeleteSorry, no time here to look into the data. A student here did suggest that at least the "Jewish" columns may be quite unreliable because they were not actual counts of Jewish Olympiad/Putnam/... winners: instead the number of stereotypically Jewish surnames (Cohen, Goldstein, etc.) was used as a proxy, and multiplied by some factor to account for Jews with less ethnically-marked surnames. For example, he claims at least one counterexample to the assertion that there were 0% Jews among the Putnam winners in 2011.
ReplyDelete