http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/olympics/2008/08/can_anyone_spoil_phelps_pool_p.html

1 What makes Phelps so special?

I'm sure if you checked any doctor's chart a 6ft 4ins, 83kg man would definitely be seriously underweight.

When trying to win Olympic gold medals it works fairly well!

http://olympics.thestar.com/2008/article/477307

2 Why is breaking records  so easy  these days ?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2008/08/13/olympic-inflation.aspx

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance.

3. Pool width and gutters. Two extra lanes at the margins disperse waves to gutters, reducing ricochet and resistance.

3  Swim records tumble but nobody is asking why

The reasons this isn't being addressed as much as it should are obvious. Nobody wants to kill a great story, and nightly record-setting makes for great stories and great ratings. Maybe there's nothing to this. Maybe the records are due to the phenomenal performances inspired by proximity to the Great Wall.

But the question needs to be asked more often.

http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2008-08-06/113116071920.shtml

“让我们一起走近上海的严锋、韩寒、陈忠伟，北京的黄健翔、苗炜、李承鹏、大仙，广州的苏坚，深圳的李松，法国的戴亮，试图通过他们的亲身体验，揭示北京奥运的寻常生活。”

南海出版公司正公开选拔该书的译者。

上海译文出版社方面称，他们也早就注意到了这本新书，但一方面觉得这本书“基本上都是一些短小的文字，并没有太大的意思，价值不高”，另一方面“村上春树方面要求的版权费用又太高”，所以双方最终没有谈拢。

林少华说，“我也听说了这部作品的版权费是个天价，估计作品要发行50万册才能保本，真有点难以置信。”

上海译文，没必要吃不到葡萄就说葡萄酸吧？没争到版权也别说该书没有太大的意思。。要说有太大的意思，你只能去出版马恩全集和物种起源了

http://www.exorcising-ghosts.co.uk/running.html

6月9日的纽约客上有节选，英译者Philip Gabriel

比较有意思的是，他比较开酒吧或跑步跟写小说各种类似的地方：

开酒吧十个人里头只要有一个回头客就能赚钱，写小说也是，只要有人看了第一本就等着买第二本就行；开酒吧要跟自己不喜欢的人打交道，写小说只要跟没有特定书目的读者打交道；有人写小说凭天分，写起来毫不费力，可是一旦天分枯竭，就没戏了。凭后天努力写小说，虽然费劲，但可持续。As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they've exhausted their source, they're in trouble.

书中写道：“我采访过奥运会马拉松选手Toshihiko Seko，就在他退役的时候。我问他，像你这种水平的运动员有没有想着自己某一天不再跑下去了？他瞪着我，用一种使我们的问题显得非常愚蠢的声调回答说，当然，一直都这么想！”of course. All the time!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/sports/olympics/06vecsey.html?fta=y

Amateurs at the Olympics? Not in Your Dreams

It is hard to argue that all these professionals are doing it for the fun of hanging out with the fencers and weight lifters in the athletes’ village. More likely, their sneaker sponsors are telling them it’s good business.

这些职业运动员不是过来跟击剑和举重运动员在奥运村玩耍的。更有可能的是，他们的运动鞋赞助商告诉他们，这是个好买卖。

It was the English upper classes who created the myth of amateurism so they didn’t have to compete against the workers,” said Wallechinsky, who recently issued the 2008 version of his valuable reference, “The Complete Book of the Olympics.”

英国的上层阶级创造了业余性的神话，这样他们就不用跟工人比赛了。

The bad part about all this money is that some sports have been tossed out on their ear. Women’s softball will not be around in London in 2012 because the rosters take up a lot of dormitory space and, oh, yes, because the dominant softball team on this planet just happens to be the United States.

唯利是图的不利的一面是，有一些项目被排斥在外。2012年伦敦奥运会不设垒球项目，因为垒球运动员会占据大量宿舍，还有，世界上最强的垒球队刚好是美国队。

棒球也被淘汰了，部分是因为大联盟可能不想把它最好的运动员送去接受奥运药检，它也不愿意像曲棍球那样为奥运停赛三周。

Baseball has also flunked out, partly because Major League Baseball might not want to send its best players to Olympic drug testing and also because it would not close down for three weeks for the Olympics the way hockey does.

BBC英国报摘：

《每日电讯报》、《独立报》和《泰晤士报》报道了英国奥运代表队抵达澳门训练营的消息，并刊登了女子马拉松运动员拉德克里夫的照片。

《每日电讯报》说，拉德克里夫三周前在训练期间小休，脚趾却被一只毒蜘蛛咬了一口，使她发烧和不能走动，被迫停止训练。

《泰晤士报》头版标题说“一只小蜘蛛使拉德克里夫夺金的希望遽降”。

《独立报》的标题则说，拉德克里夫加紧锻炼恢复最佳状态参加马拉松。

Sting in tail: Analysis by Lewis Smith

Experts trying to identify what caused Paula Radcliffe’s foot to swell say it was more likely to be a scorpion’s sting. Plenty of spiders are found in the Pyrenees, where Radcliffe lives, but they are too small to harm humans. Scorpions are found there and David Bohan, of Rothamsted Research, said that they make better suspects, especially as spiders “often get the blame”.

Two scoprions in the region with the capacity to sting humans are Belisarius xambeui and Euscorpius flavicaudis, both of which like to lurk under stones and in old buildings, and even as adults are little more than an inch long.

“We don’t know of any spiders that might be able to do this,” he said after consulting colleagues. “We think it’s more likely to be a scorpion - even so, it’s still a bit of a long shot.”

拉德克里夫有没有给自己的腿脚上保险呢？

07年10月的报道说，周一，中国田协与中国平安保险进行商业合作，刘翔收到了一份来自中国平安保险公司、保额高达1亿元人民币的人身意外险保单，而刘翔也成为亿元高额保单的国内第一人。与此同时，中国国家田径队也与平安公司结成保险合作伙伴，为此，国家队中的一百名运动员也每人收到了一份保额为100万元的保单，总价值是同样也是1亿元。

http://epaper.nddaily.com/A/html/2008-08/01/content_532875.htm

7年前在加拿大埃德蒙顿，加里在保拉没有遵照他的战术安排而丢掉万米冠军后当着转播镜头冲其大吼：“你他妈的为什么那么跑？”第二天保拉的妈妈给了他一通电话，只说了一句：“你他妈的是个神经病。”

http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-34801220080803?sp=true

At the Seoul Summer Games, the South Korean crowd went crazy when 76-year-old Sohn Kee-Chung, winner of the 1936 marathon, carried the torch into the stadium.

He had been forced to enter that marathon using a Japanese name because Korea was then occupied by Japan.

But cynics may recall Seoul as the year of the burnt doves.

Several of the birds -- traditional symbols of peace -- met an untimely end while sitting on the edge of the Olympic cauldron for the lighting of the flame.

The flame-lighting is the climax of the show and organisers work long and hard in secrecy searching for the wow factor.

http://www.besternews.com/related/Bester+News+-+Sports+News/WITNESS:+Love+or+hate+them,+Olympic+openings+are+pure+kitsch/?ref=sports

http://ckxx.org.cn/other/other2008080424/

http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-34801220080803?sp=true

At the Seoul Summer Games, the South Korean crowd went crazy when 76-year-old Sohn Kee-Chung, winner of the 1936 marathon, carried the torch into the stadium.

He had been forced to enter that marathon using a Japanese name because Korea was then occupied by Japan.

But cynics may recall Seoul as the year of the burnt doves.

Several of the birds -- traditional symbols of peace -- met an untimely end while sitting on the edge of the Olympic cauldron for the lighting of the flame.

The flame-lighting is the climax of the show and organisers work long and hard in secrecy searching for the wow factor.

http://www.besternews.com/related/Bester+News+-+Sports+News/WITNESS:+Love+or+hate+them,+Olympic+openings+are+pure+kitsch/?ref=sports

http://ckxx.org.cn/other/other2008080424/

我有幸观看了自1984年之后的所有奥运会开幕式，所有开幕式都不过是把粗糙的表演、狂热的民族情绪、冗长的运动员入场式以及乏味的演说结合在一起。

1  Slate：搜索引擎鉴定

用它搜索布什、伟哥和自己的名字，比较其结果

Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that the definitions for ain't and like could identify whether a dictionary was prescriptive or descriptive, it's high time for a quick and dirty litmus test for the Googles (and Cuils) of the world.

冯内古特曾经提议，只要看一个词典对ain't和like的定义，就可以判断这是一部描述性的还是规定性的词典。

2 Scientifically (In)accurate Horoscopes

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=looking-for-a-sign&print=true

科学美国人，星座，作者 Steve Mirsky

We Scientific Americans are emphatic empiricists. And although astronomy and astrology have common historical roots, the modern practice of astrology is total hooey. (And we say that only because we choose not to use stronger words than hooey in a family magazine.)

Nevertheless, some staffers were recently musing about what a horoscope would look like in our august pages. (Or September, even.) So here’s a proof-of-concept. It’s not based on science, because it’s impossible to have a horoscope based on science. But it’s science heavy. Specific predictions accompany individual zodiacal signs as per the form of the typical newspaper or magazine horoscope page (and shame on all you allegedly legitimate news outlets for running such garbage). Some of the predictions may seem intimately related to the sign in question. Even so, consider them all totally interchangeable, as the truly important aspect of the coordinates of your birth is the GDP at that time and place. And away we go.

Aquarius: “When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high” is a lovely song lyric but terrible advice if the storm is electrical.

Pisces: You fear the addition of fish proteins to ice cream, added to improve smoothness. But you’re basically just a modestly modified fish—anatomically, physiologically and genetically. So take some omega-3 pills and read Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, just for the halibut.

Aries: Your attempt to clone your dog Binky based on the hope that Binky 2 will know where “original” Binky hid the leather wallet he took off your end table and hid for the last time just before he died of distemper betrays your utter ignorance of both cloning and Binky’s deeply malevolent nature.

Taurus: While looking at a region of space in which a supernova was in progress, researchers at Princeton University recently noted the beginning of another supernova through the detection of x-rays. Which reminds me, the films came back, and the radiologist says your arm is broken in two places.

Gemini: The influence of genetics on behavior is apparently so strong that you and the identical twin brother you haven’t seen since birth and don’t even know about both spend most of your time watching sports on television, whereas the average American man only spends a great deal of his time watching sports on television.

Cancer: Rather than employing hemoglobin, the blood of the horseshoe crab contains hemocyanin, which binds oxygen with copper rather than iron. The crab’s blood is therefore a beautiful pale blue rather than the bright red, viscous liquid that you will continue to lose unless you get a tourniquet on that busted arm.

Leo: “A fatal, Alzheimer’s-like disease that attacks cheetahs’ internal organs and has impeded breeding of the cats in captivity may be spread by their feces.” Thus ran a report on May 12 at www.SciAm.com. So remember that when it comes to longevity, waste makes haste. What, you were expecting “cheetahs never prosper”?

Virgo: Some people are against the use of a cervical cancer vaccine because they fear it will promote promiscuity. This is roughly the equivalent of being against the use of the polio vaccine because it may increase the risk of drowning in public swimming pools. Anyway, get your shots already.

Libra: The good news is that you will be part of an investigation using the advanced forensic CSI techniques that you find so fascinating, methodologies like DNA amplification that can identify a person based on only the tiniest amounts of physical remains. That’s also the bad news, if you see where we’re going with this.

Scorpio: If you hadn’t been born prematurely, you could have been a Sagittarius, maybe even a Capricorn. But it’s the related fact that your mother smoked while she was pregnant that’s the salient point in influencing your life’s trajectory.

 Sagittarius: You will go on a long journey when you become a highly trained astronaut and travel to the International Space Station to fix the toilet.

Capricorn: Your former opposition to embryonic stem cell research becomes grudging support when you realize that Michael J. Fox isn’t shaking, you are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin

READING THE OED

One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.

By Ammon Shea.

一口气读完牛津英语大典

Could Shea really make his witting way through 20 heavy volumes of tri-columnated type, all of it twinkling and squirming with abbreviations, small caps, foreign derivations and archaic spellings? Could one man read, in one year’s time, 59 million consecutive words — the equivalent of one John Grisham novel per day — of definitional “prose”? Or would Shea fail and be forever known as the guy who read through to the letter N and couldn’t go on?

His party has been trounced in recent by-elections, and voters blame him for the country's sputtering economy. So as Gordon Brown and his family spend their summer vacation at a beachside town on England's east coast this week, you might understand why Britain's Prime Minister hasn't ventured further. Amid whispers that colleagues are plotting to replace him, staying within earshot of Westminster (and taking along his Downing Street staff) is a good idea. And for the price of an ice cream, or the hire of a deck chair in the Suffolk resort of Southwold, he might even claim he's giving back to Britain's beleaguered businesses.

In choosing to vacation at home, Brown's in good company. His predecessor Tony Blair drew jeers from British newspapers for his lavish holidays abroad, but many British politicians are sticking closer to home this summer. Finance Minister Alistair Darling has chosen an island off Scotland's northwest coast for his vacation, while Conservative Party leader David Cameron has hit the beach in Cornwall, southwest England (though he is fitting in a second holiday in Turkey in a few weeks).

One of the few politicians to flaunt his decision to reject Britain for foreign shores is Boris Johnson — but then the disarmingly frank Conservative who became London's mayor in May doesn't have to face voters again for four years. "I say stuff Skegness," Johnson wrote in his column in The Daily Telegraph last week, scorning the seaside town in England's east. "I say bugger Bognor," he added, knocking another in the south. "I am going to take a holiday abroad, and in my view it would be absurd, hypocritical and frankly inhumane to do anything else."

Johnson (half) jokes, but in defending his right to vacation abroad he also recognizes an unquestionable fact of modern politics: where a leader chooses to holiday is invariably loaded with meaning. It's the reason President Bill Clinton headed for the Wyoming mountains for a vacation in 1996 after his pollster told him his preferred spot, Martha's Vineyard, was seen by swing voters as too snooty. It explains why, in 2003, when an Italian tourism official likened Germans to "stereotyped blonds with hyper-nationalist pride ... who noisily invade our beaches", Germany's then Chancellor Gerhard Schr[u {o}]der nixed a vacation in Italy in favor of two weeks in Hanover. (That spat's long over: Schröder's successor Angela Merkel is rumored to be heading for an Italian vacazione this summer.)

It also has a lot to do with why Brown opted for the beach houses and tearooms of Southwold. When the economy you've spent more than a decade running starts to tank, voters probably won't appreciate it if you head off to Greece or the Caribbean. A week in unglamorous Southwold also fits well with the slight air of austerity that Brown has used to mark a break with his flashier former boss and rival Blair, famous for his breaks in aging pop star Cliff Richard's Barbados house and Bee Gee Robin Gibb's Florida mansion. Britain is the "best place in the world to have a holiday," said Brown last summer. This from a man who was a regular visitor to Cape Cod until he became Prime Minister.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, however, has no qualms with vacationing in the U.S.: he famously flipped burgers with President Bush at the Commander in Chief's oceanfront retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine last summer (Sarkozy didn't stay with Bush but based himself in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire). And what of Sarko's "buddy," the Democratic nominee Barack Obama? He's going to spend a week in his native Hawaii come mid-August, though is still planning to hold a fund raiser during the trip. But at least Obama will have some downtime: his Republican rival John McCain hasn't even announced whether he's going to take any vacation.

Even the most irascible voter recognizes that their leaders need a break from time to time. So why should we care where our leaders vacation? "We assume we're much more rational than we are, that we look at a politician and a party and we assess their policies and calculate [their impact] for us," says Rodney Barker, head of the Government department at the London School of Economics. "But we also look at politicians and ask: 'are they our sort of person?'" And that, says Catherine Needham, a lecturer in politics at Queen Mary, part of the University of London, includes "looking at their holiday destinations."

Key to getting away with a getaway: politicians should appear slightly superior to their target voters, says Barker, but not remote or filthy rich. "You mustn't be too ordinary," he says. "Go to Southwold, but don't queue for fish and chips like everyone else. That cultivation of distance and similarity at the same time, that's the difficult trick." And above all, don't have too much fun. According to a recent survey for British tour operator Thomas Cook, two-thirds of Britons feel jealous about other people's holidays. Taking a break from politics is one thing, says Barker, "so long as [politicians] don't seem to be enjoying themselves too much." For an embattled Brown, there seems little danger of that.

《经济学人》：

After breakfast he started work on his speech for the Labour Party conference in September. It would be the speech of his life, a speech that would unite his party, silence his rivals, make floating voters swoon and grown Tories weep. It would acknowledge the economic plight of hard-working families while reminding people that the real culprits were nefarious financiers, greedy oil moguls and hungry Asians. It would draw a perfect arc from his childhood in Kirkcaldy to the after-hours opening of doctors’ surgeries.

“Listen and learn,” he scribbled: “tough long-term decisions…the fierce urgency of now”. (He instinctively wrote “no return to boom and bust”, but crossed it out.) He speed-read the copy of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The De-Moralization of Society” that he’d brought for inspiration.