for example, will we ever see a three-minute mile?

8/10/2012 10:42:13 PM

Yes, there is a limit.

Three minute mile I have no idea, but I feel sure that we will reach the limit before we see the 3 second mile.

[Edited on August 10, 2012 at 10:47 PM. Reason : ]

8/10/2012 10:46:29 PM

not if you let people use prosthetic legs, apparently that makes them super human

8/10/2012 10:47:17 PM

world records are broken pretty much every olympics...i just wonder when breaking records will become implausible

8/10/2012 10:49:31 PM

^by hundreths of a second, not by seconds or minutes.

8/10/2012 11:03:18 PM

Quote :

"not if you let people use prosthetic legs, apparently that makes them super human"

yeah, equipment has never provided an advantage to an athlete.

8/10/2012 11:11:00 PM

I would like to see what the human body is capable of. How about we let athletes dope and see what happens. 8 second 100 meter dash?

8/10/2012 11:12:48 PM

...followed by immediate cardiac arrest

8/10/2012 11:14:53 PM

8/10/2012 11:14:56 PM

No there isn't. Eventually humans will run faster than the speed of light

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

8/10/2012 11:22:33 PM

it's more of an abstract question.

i'm mistergreen and i approved this message

8/10/2012 11:29:54 PM

I actually took a class on human enhancement in my last semester. It is certainly possible to achieve such feats in the future, however, the key to the question is how you define "human".

8/10/2012 11:43:01 PM

Viagra

8/10/2012 11:47:54 PM

performance?


Are you saying there's something wrong with my gear?

8/11/2012 12:01:59 AM

I would be willing to bet if you graphed most records they would look fairly exponential, and thus have an asymptote. So while records will continue to be broken each year, the margins will get smaller and smaller as they approach the limits of human capabilities.

The only real question is, how much will/do humans, supplements, training techniques, etc evolve that might shift that asymptote.

8/11/2012 1:02:26 AM

3D printer could build a house in 20 hours


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/3d-printer-could-build-house-20-hours-224156687.html

8/11/2012 1:12:48 AM

Yes. No.

8/11/2012 1:30:59 AM

^^thats pretty neat

8/11/2012 1:49:21 AM

Disney creates a method for turning plants into touch sensors


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/disney-creates-method-turning-plants-touch-sensors-233610134.html



Two crazy mindblowing ideas/inventions/technologies in 1 day. I'm impressed.

8/11/2012 2:07:51 AM

yeah thats pretty cool too, but not nearly as cool/useful/practical as the previous link

8/11/2012 2:17:02 AM

i can't figure out why they only display times to the nearest .01 second when the equipment they use is accurate to .0005 second

i saw several "ties" where .001 second resolution would have changed the ranking

i guess my point is they'll have to start displaying times to the nearest millisecond if human performance continues to excel and approach the limit of what is possible

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 9:17 AM. Reason : wording]

8/11/2012 9:15:10 AM

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-07/fyi-will-athletes-ever-stop-breaking-records

Quote :

"FYI: Will Athletes Ever Stop Breaking Records? Even if athletes never got any stronger or faster, and if their techniques and training never changed, they would still break records from time to time. That’s because the ability of each person who decides to compete, and the outcome of each competition, are affected by random processes. What happened on the way to the track that might affect the athletes’ performance? What’s the weather like? And so on. Every sporting event is a matter of chance as well as of achievement, and chance always offers the possibility of a breakthrough. That said, the mathematics of record-breaking—also known as “extreme-value statistics”—tell us that, all things being equal, the frequency of world records will tend to diminish. At a certain point, we’ll have rolled the dice so many times that the chance of our beating our best score drops close to zero. That’s why new sports and new classes of competitors typically produce more records than old ones. Women athletes weren’t allowed to compete in the Olympic marathon until 1984. Since then, their record time has dropped by about 10 minutes, while the men have managed to shave off only five. All things are not equal, of course: Athletes are much better conditioned than they were in the first modern Olympics, held in 1896. Many competitors are now professionals instead of amateurs, they’ve developed new techniques (high jumpers used to go over the bar face down; now they flop over backwards), and they have new equipment. Each of these developments accelerated the pace of record-breaking, and any projections for the future must take further innovation into account. (Extreme-value statistics can also be useful for spotting patterns outside of sports. For instance, researchers have tried to apply record-breaking calculations to the study of climate change, to figure out the likelihood for any given day to be the “hottest on record” as the atmosphere heats up.) pullquote: “The mathematics of record-breaking tell us that, all things being equal, the frequency of world records will tend to diminish.”Athletes tend to blow records wide open only during periods of major innovation. The rest of the time the gains are incremental, or nonexistent. Research by Alan Nevill, a biostatistician at the University of Wolverhampton in England, shows that world records tend to accumulate slowly at first and then go through a period of rapid acceleration as new technologies are adopted and more people compete. Once this period of innovation ends, the record-breaking curve flattens out. Some sports have multiple periods of acceleration. The design of bicycles dramatically affects cyclists’ performance; the introduction of carbon fiber helped riders to break multiple records. Anabolic steroids may have contributed to recent firsts in some track events, and new swimwear fabrics reduce drag in the water, helping swimmers set new standards in the sport. It’s possible, though, that the pace of innovation in Olympic sports—in terms of both technique and technology—is slowing down. In 2008, Paris-based researcher Geoffroy Berthelot looked at more than 3,000 world records from 147 sporting events in the Olympics, going all the way back to 1896. When he plotted the records over time, he found an exponentially decaying rate—“a major global fading of [world-record] progression,” as he put it. Two thirds of track-and-field events have stagnated since the early 1990s, and the rate has also slowed for other individual sports. “You see it now,” he says—athletes may be approaching their biomechanical limits at last."

8/11/2012 10:41:17 AM

Quote :

" I would be willing to bet if you graphed most records they would look fairly exponential, and thus have an asymptote. So while records will continue to be broken each year, the margins will get smaller and smaller as they approach the limits of human capabilities."

I saw a graph of the record times for sprints, up to and including Usain Bolt, and it was pretty much linear.

8/11/2012 11:51:18 AM

it's not linear at all

bet fit is logarithmic

8/11/2012 11:54:56 AM

I don't think this was since the inception of the modern olympics...more like last 30-40 years, which probably explains the difference. I'll try to find it.

8/11/2012 12:07:16 PM

-

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 12:15 PM. Reason : -]

8/11/2012 12:15:27 PM

Never mind, no, it's since the beginning of the modern Olympics, and to me, it looks pretty damned linear.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/05/sports/olympics/the-100-meter-dash-one-race-every-medalist-ever.html

8/11/2012 12:15:54 PM

I mean, if you isolate the part of the curve where slope is low and don't use the right scale it will look linear

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 12:17 PM. Reason : shit that is a terrible graph]

8/11/2012 12:16:39 PM

what are they isolating? It has every Olympics.

8/11/2012 12:24:27 PM

Is it evolution?


or is it


higher goal setting?

8/11/2012 1:10:42 PM

there wont ever be a 3 minute mile.

8/11/2012 1:19:24 PM

Quote :

"there wont ever be a 3 minute mile. "

Bullshit! i saw it on futurama once.

8/11/2012 1:25:39 PM

a woman has never run a 4 minute mile...best is like 4:11 iirc

8/11/2012 1:37:59 PM

my isolating statement was in response to your 12:07 post

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 1:42 PM. Reason : anyway, it's not linear]

8/11/2012 1:40:54 PM

Quote :

" I would be willing to bet if you graphed most records they would look fairly exponential, and thus have an asymptote."

Yea i think its been said but its log growth, not exponential

8/11/2012 1:41:07 PM

There will never be a three-minute mile run by anyone who we would now classify as a regular human athlete. That is sixteen 100m dashes in a row, each at 11 seconds a piece.

8/11/2012 1:46:59 PM

^^^ Right, I was assuming the same thing--that the graph would only show the last few decades, after the curve flattened out...but once I found the graph again, I saw that wasn't the case. Maybe it's not perfectly linear; if you actually did a regression equation, there would probably be some small coefficient for a log component, but just eyeballing it, that looks close enough to a straight line to support what I was saying--that it's approximately linear enough so far that we aren't yet approaching the limit.

^ The point is that these gains in the record books are so incremental that there very well could be a regular human athlete to do that in the future, as training methods, nutrition, and human evolution progress (potentially). When you get a second or two faster once every few years, it takes a long time to shave the better part of a minute off the time. Saying that no "regular human" will ever do it would be like people in 1900 saying that nobody would every break 4:00.

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 3:13 PM. Reason : ]

8/11/2012 3:08:30 PM

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 3:09 PM. Reason : dbl post]

8/11/2012 3:08:30 PM

^^ it's definitely incredibly close to being linear

We've got more potential we can squeeze out, but I doubt it's much more.

8/11/2012 3:15:12 PM

the set of data we're talking about - of which you have not shown a graph - is not linear

you're looking at a poor graphical representation of a manipulated data set

8/11/2012 3:15:38 PM

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

8/11/2012 3:17:15 PM

It's a simple scatterplot of all the winning times from 1896 to now. There are no shenanigans with the scales. Where is the manipulation or poor representation? I see no sleight of hand here.

8/11/2012 3:17:27 PM

8/11/2012 4:01:16 PM

So, you're saying there is no limit?

8/11/2012 4:01:32 PM

If you look at only the section of the steepest slope on a logarithmic curve, it will appear linear.

that's essentially what we're looking at here.

8/11/2012 4:03:29 PM

The bible teaches that through god, all things are possible

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

8/11/2012 4:17:33 PM

^^ Yes, I get that. I'm just saying that I don't get how anyone is claiming that we are looking at that here, at least so far.

^^^ No, not saying that. I'm just saying that it doesn't appear that we're even close to approaching it, yet. It doesn't even look like the curve is even appreciably beginning to flatten out. To me, it looks awfully close to linear for entire 116 years that we have data for.

[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 4:20 PM. Reason : ]

8/11/2012 4:19:53 PM

There is no limit to what can be achieved through god.

8/11/2012 4:26:25 PM

I don't see any asymptote forming.


The length between two consecutive plot points should get smaller and smaller as we approach the limit.



[Edited on August 11, 2012 at 4:58 PM. Reason : /]

8/11/2012 4:54:19 PM

I see a line

8/11/2012 4:59:25 PM