The article doesn't seem to go into the actual physics too much. It instead links to a blog post [0] and another article [1] that go into more detail. I recommend reading these over the gizmodo one.
Not sure if we should change the URL to the first article you've linked to; it's by the same author, but from 2014, and perhaps there's new information in the current post. Perhaps we'll just take "physics" out of the title above.
There’s a strong belief in the sport that it’s the players throwing the stones, not the sweepers, who should have the strongest influence on individual shots.
My first thought upon reading that sentence was, "Isn't it a team sport?"
The argument is it fundamentally changes the nature of the sport. Imagine if somebody came up with a baseball with a magnet in it that was attracted to the catcher's glove. The catcher now has most of the control as to where the ball goes and all the pitcher is doing is applying speed to the ball. Would that be a natural advancement of the sport? Or would it be cheating?
That's the question the curling world is asking right now. And to make the whole thing murkier, they're able to make this fundamental change not by adding technical wizardry, but by subtly altering something that is already part of the game. Exploiting a flaw in the game, as it were.
> Imagine if somebody came up with a baseball with a magnet in it that was attracted to the catcher's glove. The catcher now has most of the control as to where the ball goes and all the pitcher is doing is applying speed to the ball. Would that be a natural advancement of the sport? Or would it be cheating?
Imagine if somebody invented a hollow aluminum baseball bat that could hit the ball much farther than a wooden bat could.
How did they "fundamentally change the nature of the sport"? As I understood things, aluminum bats were banned as an effort to make sure professional baseball records from the past stayed comparable to records from the present. They're not, of course, since early athletes didn't use steroids, but we're stuck with the wooden bats anyway.
People would be getting killed if MLB players were playing baseball with some of the aluminum and newer composite bats that are developed now.
I used to play in a men's modified pitch softball league where, even with the half-drunk middle-aged men that were playing, when the DiMarini composite bats came out, guys were using them and ripping line drives that could take your head off. Had to downgrade to a squishier series of softballs that didn't transfer as much of the force from the bat.
> Aesthetically, wooden bats are generally preferred to metal, both for their traditional appearance and satisfying traditional "crack", far superior to alloy bats' hollow "ping".
That seems to fall a bit short of "neutral point of view".
I grew up in Florida, so clearly my view of curling is from the outside beyond exposure during "those crazy Canadians" segments during US broadcasts of the Winter Olympics. From here, it looks mostly analogous to the introduction of fiber glass to tennis rackets or surfboards: technology also changes ideas about what is possible in ways that have little to do with what the technology enables.
Though baseball gloves might serve similarly, their evolution was mostly before my time:
If the technology allows advancement of what the higher-skilled human athlete is able to achieve, I think it's good for the sport.
If it merely removes challenge I would not favor it. To call something sport, the skill and effort of the human competitor(s) must be the primary determinant of success.
A long time ago a friend used to quip "it's not a sport unless steroids help".
By that definition, I don't think curling qualifies. But perhaps someone who actually has participated can chime in. E.g. does having more physical strength help in the initial push given to the rock?
The ability to apply more force means it's easier to be more accurate in upweight shots. The men's game at the elite level is a hitting game. The women's game is getting closer to that with training and ice conditions, but there are very few teams women's teams in the world that can hang with the hitting of the top men's teams, currently.
Where it's more important is sweeping, up to this point at least. Teams like Jacobs have shown how much of an advantage powerful sweeping is - the range of accuracy is much wider for them compared to me throwing the same hit with two club sweepers. That's the second part of the equation that most people miss in thinking that curling isn't a strength sport.
Of course now, you don't need to be nearly as strong to achieve the drastic changes in rock movement that you did before, and that's one of the concerns.
There are no such rules for what constitutes a sport. Under your definition, business, programming, poker, sex, war, and speaking are sports, as is just about every other human endeavor.
The article doesn't get the concern of the curlers right.
Curling has recently undergone a similar transformation that other sports have gone through over recent decades: the sport has become a lot more athletic. Of course, the sweepers and the thrower play important roles in the outcome of the shot. But with newer sweeping technology, the need for the curlers to be as athletic has diminished, making the training that people like Brad Jacobs and such have done effectively meaningless.
Curling is much like golf; its a game thats supposed to be a mental battle as much as a physical one. And not just in terms of strategy, but also in terms of consistency and focus and effort.
> My first thought upon reading that sentence was, "Isn't it a team sport?"
Well, the impression I get from reading the piece is that this is supposed to reduce the thrower's contribution to nearly zero. That's not a nonsensical complaint in the face of the question "isn't it a team sport?"; they're trying to preserve a role for one of the team members.
You could just as easily replace the thrower with a controlled machine launch (in fact, the broom testing mentioned in the article already uses such a machine), and you'd have a pretty similar sport, but they don't seem to want to.
Everyone throws rocks in curling -- it's not a sport with fixed positions like quidditch. But the new brooms do mean that players will be able to ignore some throwing skills. And that the captain (read: most skilled player) will have more control over the final position of a stone.
Could we stop using -gate to mean scandal? it has very little context outside of watergate which was actually the full name of the hotel, and was also called "the watergate scandal" not simply "watergate"
Is there a real reason for it? or is it just unfashionable to use the word "scandal"?
A surprising number of words arise from a process called “misdivision”. In this case, “-gate” was coopted as a generic suffix for scandals, in the same way that “-burger” is a generic suffix for certain types of hot sandwich, even though the name comes from Hamburg+er, not ham+burger.
Off the top of my head: “a napkin” used to be “an apkin”, “a lute” used to be “al ’ud” (“the lute”, in Arabic); “an orange” used to be “a norange”, and moreover, the colour is named after the fruit—we used to call the colour “yellowred” (geoluread, in Old English).
Note that juncture loss may have occurred in a different language before a word reached English; for example, orange did not develop in English from *a norange, but rather the juncture loss occurred in Old French and Anglo-Norman orenge, or possibly in Italian.
A similar example is the "-caine" suffix on local anesthetics. This comes from their similarity to co+caine, but cocaine came from coca+ine, being a coca extract.
Thanks! I should really verify these things before trusting my memory. Napkin and apron are derived from the same root, but it’s not immediately obvious because one of them suffered misdivision (and I had apparently forgotten which one).
It has a separate etymology, but pronunciation seems to have been altered by the fruit/color into its modern form. The color was adopted later on after the two terms merged.
Surely the solution is either to have a more restrictive formula for the equipment or to make the players use each others equipment at random so that bringing a better broom might give the advantage to your opponent.
Randomizing the equipment is a bad idea. If you're confident that you would lose an even contest, then it's a good idea to bring the worst broom allowable. You might get lucky and have your opponent use it, putting them at a disadvantage. If they don't then you lose, but you were going to lose anyway. Randomization always favors the weaker party.
[0] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/p...
[1] http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/physics-of-curlin...