site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2417 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

One of my kids is doing summer swim. As a parent you have to volunteer at the swim meets if your kid is swimming in them. I found out before hand that certain positions count double when you volunteer. So I'd only need to volunteer every other swim meet that my kid is in. The position I got is "stroke and turn" judge. Basically I have to monitor the swimmers and make sure they are doing all legal strokes, turns, and finishes. I shadowed someone at the saturday meet, and then at the monday meet I was on my own.

Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.

Afterwards I was thinking that @ToaKraka might appreciate the pedantic nature of the rules(pdf).

One of the interesting aspects of the judging is that you are supposed to give an equal amount of attention to all swimmers. Usually there are 4 lanes to watch for each judge. Which means each swimmer is getting 25% of your attention. Where it gets interesting is that sometimes events are not full. So you might only have 1 swimmer to watch in your 4 lanes. You are not supposed to just watch that single swimmer. They are still supposed to get 25% of your attention. I was standing there plenty of times just watching 3 empty lanes for 75% of the race.

The swimmer I felt the worst for was a girl doing butterfly, but she must have forgotten that for a half second and came up off the dive doing freestyle (or crawl as its sometimes called), it basically violated all the stroke rules for butterfly.

I had the largest number of simultaneous DQs when three of the four lanes I was watching for breastroke were doing a fully extended arm pull (instead of bring the arms back forward before they passed the hip line.) Then two of them also failed to touch the wall with both hands. It was a frantic minute of filling out forms after that race.

That is another thing, the whole meet basically moves at the pace we do. They won't start the next race until we are done filling out our disqualification slips and are ready to watch the pool again.

Stroke and turn for summer is a lot less stringent than year round. It's a good time to learn!

Good on you for doing it. That's a position that always needs filling.

Everyone's a libertarian until they get the slightest whiff of power huh?

Ha!

I guess this becomes a more philosophical question about the purpose of sports, but I've always felt that anything that requires this kind of hawkish officiating over nuanced but artificially imposed restrictions on what types of movements are allowed should just not be a sport. If race-walking, breaststroke, and butterfly are clearly biomechanically inferior modes and their competitions end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat, then what is the point? One of the many things that got me disinterested in basketball was the endless quibbling over replays about whether some slight wriggle made for a foul or a carry or verticality, etc.

I think there is a spiritual argument in favor of precise execution of a specific movement over speed or efficiency. Developing extreme skill in a very limited domain is the point. This also serves to train your discipline and focus. You need to stay present and on task until the competition is over, otherwise you will do the wrong movements.

Besides, sports imply competition and competition implies a ruleset, right? You need to draw the line for what is and isn't appropriate somewhere. Why not do it like this?

I disagree, but I think I see your perspective. Curious what you think about figure skating and gymnastics. Eliminate figure skating and only keep speed skating? Replace gymnastics with some kind of parkour race? In both of those the bio-mechanically more difficult action is the whole point.

My interest in something as a sport correlates strongly negatively to the influence of officiating on the outcome, so I'm not very familiar with either figure skating or gymnastics. I've been told that judgement in both are actually quite rigorous and technical, and not entirely subjective as I assumed at first glance, but was not swayed enough to verify for myself.

I think most of the value in sport is a mixture of being entertained and being impressed. Even with questionable officiating, I get both out of figure skating and gymnastics. Running and swimming sports are generally impressive but rarely entertaining in and of themselves. For things like race-walking where winning seems built upon deceiving officials, I am neither entertained nor impressed.

Additionally, the role of officials there seems to be less about 'is this athlete actually cheating by means of a superior but arbitrarily disallowed technique' and more 'was the execution closer to perfection' in a way that is at least a bit more legible to a casual viewer. We all have some intuitive sense of what it looks like to stick a landing.

end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat

I wouldn't say that. There are distinct local optima that are not just bumping up against the arbitrary constraint blocking the way to the global optimum. In fact, this is arguably the definition of a good constraint: one that induces a non-trivial local optimum.

I'd agree in general, but only in cases where the bounds are clearer and the resultant local optimum is far from them. That seems to be the case for something like backstroke. I could be wrong, but I recall from Olympics time every four years discussions surrounding race-walking and breaststroke in particular, where the optimum really does seem to lie right at wherever the bounds were placed.

In a lot of competitions like this I think DQs are too harsh of a penalty. It seems like it would be a lot more fair if minor and pedantic mistakes were met with time penalties so that people who try hard and give it their best can still be rated and compare and have their speed and number of mistakes still get measured against each themselves and each other, rather than a binary "were you perfect or not?"

My sister in law takes her dogs to agility competitions and there have been events where literally nobody qualifies. What's even the point of having the event then? If someone is actively cheating then disqualifying them seems appropriate. If someone messes up slightly, or does something which if allowed to slide would give them an advantage, give them a large enough penalty that there's no way to possibly abuse it and enough incentive to work on fixing it in the future, while still letting them compete and get a score.

There was a moment in biathlon when some competitors that came from nordic skiing that couldn't shoot for their life just powered trough the penalties and didn't even bother to aim before shooting because they were absurdly faster than the regular players. Probably interesting to observe once or twice, but definitely has potential to degrade the sport.

A good time penalty in swimming in theory is one that gives slightly higher time penalty than the advantage gained. Higher than that - and it is DQ by other means. But then you will have some different types of gaming the system.

Btw - strongly recommend ActuallyVen on youtube for his F1 cheating sketches.

Most common stroke infractions do give you somewhat of an advantage, or they at least just totally change what even you are doing. Most kids' freestyle or crawl stroke is about twice as fast as their butterfly. The time penalties would have to be massive to make up for it. DQs above age thirteen are also pretty rare, so its clear that most kids can learn the strokes and the rules sufficiently to rarely DQ.

It is also somewhat hard to catch minor one time stroke infractions. If I glance over and think I saw an infraction and I describe any level of uncertainty then the Pool Ref will throw out the DQ. Usually stroke related problems are hard to see if they only happen once. Its usually that the kid is doing it wrong the entire time they are in my zone. I felt bad for the girl that did crawl during butterfly because I happened to be looking at her lane right as she did it. She had a 75% chance of being fine, but lost out on that cuz of bad luck.

One example is that you are allowed only two underwater pulls in breastroke off the wall before you are supposed to surface. I saw a kid do three, and that was after I missed him for about 5 meters off the wall. My estimate is that he actually did 4 or maybe even 5 underwater pulls. But I only reported seeing three because that is all I saw, even if I know via simple reasoning that he likely did 4 or 5. In his case if he had merely done three underwater pulls, which is illegal, I likely would not have caught him, because I would have only seen two of his pulls.

Okay that's a good point. The only viewing them 25% of the time adds some probabilistic volatility to things, but on average if someone gets away with 75% of their infractions then penalties ought to be four times as harsh to compensate, and at that point if they get harsh enough to guarantee someone last place you might as well just DQ them. It's not an ideal system, but it seems reasonable given the monitoring constraints.

Benefit of the doubt also goes to the swimmer. So maximum strictness if caught, but chances of being caught for non blatant rule violations is low.

The easiest one to catch is no two hand touch and that's also very easy to comply with.

One thing I always liked about the TV game show Forged in Fire is that if someone didn't make something to specification at the end of the first round, or the second round, or the third round, they wouldn't even get judged. Your first job is to make specifications, then it is your job to see how well you did on that spec.

If someone can't complete the course, it isn't fair to compare them to people who can.

One thing I always liked about the TV game show Forged in Fire

On the day I am pondering whether to obtain 1x30 variable speed for thinning and bevel setting, you had to mention this show ...

Forged in Fire is nearly the ideal competition in my opinion, everyone's working hard, but they're almost all willing to help a competitor who had some poor luck or an early poor choice that lead to unforseen problems.

The bladesmith/blacksmith community is incredibly cooperative and supportive.

At least for competitive swimming you just get DQ'd on that one particular event.

(You don't get booted from the meet entirely, or at least, you shouldn't be- this isn't like competitive shooting where that does happen, but that also only happens for safety infractions.)

The English of this document sounds suspiciously like it was written a hundred years ago.

Confidence can only be attained by studying the rules, attending training sessions and working regularly at meets

this does feel like something that might be in a turn of the century advice or manners pamphlet.

Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.

I got DQ'd on breastroke so many times in my youth... it's very easy to get sloppy when you're not dedicated, especially when there's competition to keep the speed pressure on.

For sure, I think breastroke is easier to DQ, but butterfly is harder to physically accomplish.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats