One of the very last posts of 2001 was from me on New Year's Eve. I don't remember whether the title was mine or the administrator who decided that it was a sub topic of something remotely connected with the subject that I was proposing. But, no matter.
Since the change of format this week to the new system, I don't know how to check it out or whether or not it makes any difference. However, after two weeks of no response of any kind and since it was my prerogative, being my birthday, the rare one that is divisable by both sevenses and elevenses, I went back to the subject to give it a boost, hoping that someone would give it some kind of notice. But, alas...
With Ground Hog's (or is it s'?) Day looming around the next corner I'm very much determined to thrust the subject forward a third time in the hope that it will get some serious attention. And it is about time whatever way you choose to take the title.
I don't remember everything I wrote the first two times but I'll simply make the proposal without any but the barest essential elaboration.
As soon as possible post all swimming times in seconds only!
Eliminate the use of minutes, or hours entirely. Having just yesterday having competed in the National Championship Event, The Hour Swim, (a Mail-in Event) I could consent to keeping the title. But for all listing and taking of times it would be 100% beneficial to use seconds only.
The only reason to oppose the notion that I can think of would be related to the existing hardware. But transpositions would be easily done until the mass of the hardware is ready to conform on its own. My guess being that the computer timing systems would need only a nudge to adapt.
Sprinters, of course, wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. But all swimmers who have a use for splits in their calculations run into stumbling blocks, not to mention common errors, that are bound to creep in whenever minutes become part of the results.
I have one other helpful suggestion to make on the subject, and because of the opportunity, why not... If Splits, for example, of a 200 or a 1500 were listed in reverse order, it would be infinitely easier and more instructive to see their value and significance.
Doug,
Take it from a professional editor (and incidentally, the volunteer editor of the USMS rule book): 25-30, 30-35, etc., not only does not SOUND right, it is NOT right! It is absolutely incorrect to have one number belong to two groups. As Emmett has pointed out, under your system, how would a 30-year-old know which age group he/she belongs to? The hyphen indicating a span of ages (technically, it's an em dash, not a hyphen) means "through," not "to" (regardless of whether you pronounce it "25 to 29" or "25 through 29"). So the 25-29 age group is made up of people ages 25 THROUGH 29. You say that only Masters swimmers use this system? Not true. My real job is editing scientific material, and my "Bible" is "Suggestions to Authors of the Reports of the United States Geological Survey." STA recommends expressing spans of numbers the exact way USMS does it. Also, age-group swimming expresses age groups the same way we do (actually, we were probably copying USA Swimming when we came up with ours). You don't have the 9-11, 11-13, etc., age groups. You have 9-10, 11-12, 13-14, etc.
I'm sorry if this doesn't sound right to you, Doug. Nevertheless, it IS right. And it's not a matter of political correctness; it's a matter of clarity.
well, thanx to Meg and youse guys who took what I had to say seriously. I was somehow on the wrong track and one of these days I'll reveal how that all got started. For now, I'll just say it was one aspect of time that I should have avoided for a while, at least until some of the other aspects had been attended to. I'll also admit that there are a lot more important things to be spending time on than the awkward sound of our age grouping.
The inclusion of the "subtractive" as well as the accumulative splits in the results is very helpful in many ways. So was the deck seeding that ahered to age grouping in all but the 400 or greater distances. I remember an hour or so's delay of one of the events at the Munich World Masters 2000 Meet when the seeding had to be redone to correct the consternation that had resulted from deviation from what had been published would be.
O.K. What would sound right , but I'm not proposing it, would be if the age groupings were 19-25, 26-30, 31-35, 36-40, 41-45. But let's try to forget that I ever brought up the subject!
I'm only guessing, but my assumption is that the lil' chillins is still being taught to count by fives without paying any attention to giving voice to all those odd things ending in 4 or 9 on the way. They still know they are there but don't feel the need to acknowledge them after their first day in class.
They still have the ears to tell them what sounds right and what doesn't.
Maybe it is a form of political correctness insinuating itself into our way of expressing a simple designation. I liken it to the inroduction of and/or, he/she, chair person, "I could care less", "as of yet", etc., ...all of which are ofensive to the ear.
Anyway, as I said before, there are lots of aspects of "time" that need to be brought to our attention, now and then.
Like, a look at the splits of the 1500 M swum in Cleveland earlier this month will show, if I counted correctly, that for eight of the men and fifteen of the women, there are some that are clearly not correctly stated.
This is not to say that their final times are not correct, but that something has caused the machine to give out information that is not correct. This is not to say,either that they don't give out some intriguing information.
Like, Scott Rabalais swam every single 100 of his 1500 as an individual negative split , if ya'll'l give him credit for a great start off the block.
It's late, gotta git.
I just finished reading through all the posts in this thread.
Why not eliminate all references to time other than seconds? Splits will be easier to compute and we can certainly eliminate a lot of confusion. Of course, we should be consistent which would meand that the 19-24 group would become the 1,641,600 - 2,159,999 group and so on. (There are 86,400 seconds in a year.) The only downside would be the added pressure on meet officials to determine a swimmers age for each event. I could start a heat in the 3,024,000 - 3,455,999 age group and finish the race in the 3,456,000 - 3,887,999 age group.
Sorry - I just couldn't resist.
Michael
I could start a heat in the 3,024,000 - 3,455,999 age group and finish the race in the 3,456,000 - 3,887,999 age group.
You've not been paying attention...that SHOULD be "the 3,024,000 - 3,456,000 age group and... the 3,456,000 - 3,887,999 age group" - It SOUNDS better that way (I'm a convert!). :)
Oh, you guys make light of a serious proposal. It would not be such odd numbers that you discuss, but the 3.0Ms (Megasecond (million seconds) ) to 3.5Ms age group. Given the precision of seconds, one would not really have to worry about the overlap that Doug seemed to allow, and you all sneer at.
Except that we wouldn't use Michael as our recorder. There are actually about 31.5Ms in a year, and his age group is *quite* young. ;) multiples of 150Ms would be appropriate.
Yes, I remember fondly my 1Gs (Gigasecond - a Billion (American) seconds) birth second. You do need to keep track of leap years, and those years when there should have been one, but wasn't (like 2000). Occasionally a second is added here and there, also.
You see, if the French had been braver it could have worked . . .
ALLRIGHT!! Like, youse're gonna make me show my hand that has both a digital, I mean decimal, time system all ready to go which starts by dividing the day, not into 24 hours, but only ten each, before and after the sun reaches its meridian, which most of us can see on most days if we look. That would divide the day, from meridian to meridian, into 2000 minutes rather than the 1440 under the present system. Seconds would be 200,000 instead of 86,400.
And, like, didn't I say a "both" in the first sentence? Meaning I had another system up my sleeve. This I call a Metric System (of musical pitch) which would be very useful in music and related sciences. Here the A's on the piano would relate to 400 instead of 440 although the sound would be the same, and its octaves downward would be 200, 100, 50, and 25 ( the lowest on the piano as we know it). As they are, they are 440, 220, 110, 55, and 27.5 cycles per second, as we used to say. This would allow mere mortals to make harmonic calculations "in the head".
But that doesn't have much of a place in a swimming context, so I'll spare you any more (we Hoosiers usually say it as "anymore"). But enuf already.
