Chad Orzel's Blog, page 15

125/366: Flash! (Aaah-aaaaaahhhhh!)

One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external flash unit for my DSLR, replacing one that broke a while back. Given that the camera has a built-in flash, you might wonder why I need this extra bulky gadget, so to answer that question, here’s a composite of five pictures I took today:

Composite image showing various flash settings. The top is the intentionally underexposed case with no flash. Top left is the direct flash, bottom left direct flash with the diffuser. Top right is indirect flash at a 45 degree angle, bottom right is indirect flash straight up.

I put the camera in full manual mode, and set it to be a little underexposed when photographing The Pip’s PAW Patrol figures and other crap on our dining room table. That’s the top center image.

The other four shots use the external flash unit in various modes. The pair on the left have the flash pointed directly forward, basically like the built-in flash unit. The top one is the regular flash, and you can see that it looks a little harsh, with a big glare spot in the glass behind the toys, and the central dog a little overexposed. The lower one is still straight ahead, but with the diffuser in place (a piece of textured plastic looking a little like a bike reflector that breaks up the outgoing light).

On the right are two images with the indirect flash. The top has the flash tipped up at a 45 degree angle, and the bottom has it straight up. These bounce the light off the ceiling, and as you can see, this gives a less harsh illumination. There’s still a bit of glare on the glass in the 45-degree shot, but that’s almost completely gone in the straight-up one.

The indirect flash images look a whole lot nicer to me than the basic direct flash (the diffuser one looks pretty similar to the 45-degree shot, so would also be okay). This also almost completely avoids the red-eye effect you get with a direct flash– you can sorta-kinda fix that in software, but as a general rule the less work you need to do in GIMP, the better.

(The optics here is basically an inverse-square sort of thing: with the direct flash, it’s acting sort of like a point source, so the light is much more intense on objects close to the lens than those farther away. Bouncing the light off the ceiling first means that there isn’t too much difference in distance between the nearest and farthest objects in the image, so everything is lit about the same. You also get less glare and red-eye because you don’t have light coming straight from the flash and reflecting straight back into the camera.)

And that’s why I like having the external flash unit. You can get some of the same effect by taping a white piece of paper in front of the built-in flash, but that’s inelegant and not quite as flexible (there are other tricks you can pull with the external unit, too). Which is why it was a great Christmas gift…

123-124/366: Slack!

One of our Christmas presents for the kids was a slackline kit, which they wanted set up pretty much the instant I got home. So I put it up over the weekend, and on consecutive days got these pictures:

The slackline strung between two trees in the back yard.

SteelyKid’s feet bouncing above the slackline.

(I of course also have a bunch of photos where you can see the kids’ entire bodies, but for the umpteenth time, I’m trying not to have this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day…)

Those two seem like they go together, and that catches us up through Sunday. I will try to get back to regular daily posting; we’ll see how that goes…

117-122/366: Catching Up, Renaissance Edition

After the trip to my parents’ for Christmas, I flew down to Charleston, SC to attend the Renaissance Weekend (though none of it fell on an actual weekend day…). This provided some much-needed stress relief, but was not great in photo-a-day terms, as it’s a strictly off the record event, so I couldn’t exactly photograph sessions I was in or anything like that. But it does provide another nice set of breakpoints to define a collection of catching-up photos, including one bonus shot to make up for the missing day in the previous set.

117/366:

The traditional thing to do when on the road is to take a shot out the hotel room window, but that was spattered with rain and facing the sun when I got in, so I couldn’t get anything useful. So here’s a photo of my hotel room, instead.

My room at the Belmond Charleston Place hotel.

This included “turn-down service,” which is one of the more baffling features of high-end hotels, to me. One day, I was taking a nap when they came around, and they left a note on the door saying “We saw the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, so didn’t come in; let us know when you leave so we can do the turn-down service.” And, honestly, I can’t imagine why I would bother– I mean, what’s the point of coming in to make the bed I was just napping in, so I have to un-make it again when I come back to go to sleep?

118/366:

You get three crappy cell-phone photos in this set, because as noted above, I couldn’t really bring my fancy camera to the meeting. This is the crappiest:

Spoiler warning.

I do appreciate that they made the effort to warn people. I didn’t go to the session, though, so I can’t say what they had to say about the movie (which I enjoyed, but not in a way that led to anything especially bloggable).

119/366:

The Belmond sets up an elaborate train display between the two big curving staircases in the lobby during the holidays.

Model trains at the Belmond Charleston Place hotel.

I have no idea what they do with this space the rest of the year, but these are kind of cool. I have a similar shot with the DSLR from another day, but it’s not all that dramatically better than this one.

120/366:

On New Year’s Eve the Renaissance Weekend takes the afternoon off for “lunch on your own” prior to an earlier dinner than the other nights. I grabbed some BBQ and wandered around Charleston with my good camera for a couple hours. It’s a beautiful city, but has one significant issue:

Statue honoring the Confederate defenders of Charleston, in the Battery park.

This is a statue in the Battery, done in that tacky 19th century public art style. It’s not really my thing, but it functions as a good representation of the problem with Charleston (and pretty much any other old city in the Deep South). The inscription on this honors “The Confederate defenders of Charleston,” for managing to keep the city from being overrun (though as I noted in last year’s recap, Sherman probably could’ve put the place to the torch if he’d really wanted to).

And, you know, that raises some major issues for a Yankee like me. After all, in the strictest sense, those men were traitors, fighting in the service of a would-be nation that richly deserved to be driven down, in support of a monstrous institution that was the cause of unimaginable human misery. I’m not too thrilled about maintaining public monuments to such a reprehensible cause.

On the other hand, many of them were also ordinary folks defending their homes and families from what would have been horrific devastation had the Union actually taken the city. You can’t really fault them for that, insofar as it’s separable from the whole Confederacy thing. And what’s more, it’s at least in part thanks to their efforts that downtown Charleston is the beautiful and charming city that it is– the many buildings that pre-date the Civil War probably wouldn’t still be standing had it not been for those defenders. That’s arguably an accomplishment worth honoring; at the very least, it’s not easy to wish that they had been much less successful.

So, you know, it’s complicated. Still not sure where I ultimately come down on this, but I will say that all the locals I interacted were extremely nice. As is typical of the South, which makes it harder to hold their ugly past against them…

121/366:

To make up for the missing photo from the last batch, and also that awkward turn into heavy politics, here’s a pretty picture of a fountain:

Cool fountain in Charleston’s Waterfront Park.

Splashy!

122/366:

On the way home, I had a long layover in the BWI airport, which was a good thing because the service in the new pseudo-pub there was amazingly slow. To lift JFK’s line about DC, it offered Northern charm and Southern efficiency. This did, however, allow me to see a cool sunset out the window of the restaurant:

The sun setting over Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Another crappy cell-phone photo, alas, because I didn’t feel like unpacking my camera bag to get a better shot.

And those are the photos from my trip to Charleston. There will be one more multi-image post to get things back in synch, later tonight. And then it will be back to the usual procedure, at least until the next time I take a multi-day trip out of town…

109-116/366: Catching Up, Holiday Edition

I’m back after the traditional family holiday and a less traditional trip to Charleston, SC for the Renaissance Weekend meeting. Which means things will start to return to what passes for normal around here, and that means it’s time to get caught up on photo-a-day pictures…

What with one thing and another, there was one day in December when I didn’t take a single picture, not even a crappy cell-phone snapshot. Not sure how that happened. I’ll fill it in at some point with an extra from a day when I got multiple good images, but this catch-up post will be one short of the actual calendar span covered.

109/366:

We were really late getting our Christmas tree this year, because the annual trip to Florida was a bit later than past years. But we did get one from the slim picking left at the tree lot, and here it is:

The Chateau Steelypips tree, 2015.

110/366:

The missing day is between these two– on Sunday the 20th, I managed not to take any photos. Not sure how. On the 21st, I went down to NYC to visit my friend Andy who was in from the West Coast, and while I didn’t take my good camera, I did take a couple of shots with my phone on the way:

View out the window of the Amtrak train coming up on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The sepia effect here isn’t a crappy electronic filter effect, but a real physical filter, namely the tinted windows on the Amtrak train. You take what you can get.

111/366:

A couple of years ago, my parents got a nifty wooden Advent calendar for the kids, with doors you open to reveal little gifts and whatnot. Here it is, near the end of the countdown:

The wooden Advent calendar in Chateau Steelypips.

112/366:

One of the things about getting up early enough to get SteelyKid ready for school is that I’ve seen a lot of fog in the last couple of years. Which is really pretty, but damnably difficult to photograph– mostly it just looks like you screwed up a camera setting somehow. Here’s one of my better attempts:

SteelyKid’s bus on a foggy morning.

I actually took this because I needed an illustration for a silly Christmas post at Forbes about Rayleigh scattering, but it serves well as a photo of the day, too.

113/366:

Every Christmas Eve, we get together with my dad’s side of the family for a traditional Polish celebration, usually at my Uncle John’s house. This year, it was absurdly warm– I wore a short-sleeved shirt to the party– and after dinner, the kids took their rampaging outside. Where there was a full(ish) moon and some high thin clouds:

The moon on Christmas Eve.

Note the faint colors in the halo around the moon. Optical physics is cool.

114/366:

Christmas morning, of course, there were many presents opened, but as I’ve said many times, I try to avoid having this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day, so here’s one of the few photos that doesn’t involve SteelyKid or The Pip:

The Christmas tree at my parents’ house.

I took this in part to test out my spiffy new external flash unit (replacing an old one that got broken a while back), which lets me do indirect flash easily and thus reduce the amount of screwing around with GIMP I need to do.

115/366:

SteelyKid has long been a big fan of Lego sets, and in the last year or so has gotten into Minecraft. Thus, Lego Minecraft sets featured prominently in this year’s gifts:

An intermediate stage of SteelyKid’s Lego Minecraft empire.

Really, these are perfect for each other. She put essentially all of this together herself, by the way– I helped sort out the pieces for each step, and when there were steps calling for multiple copies of the same thing, I’d make one of the duplicates. But she’s great with these, and really didn’t need me.

116/366:

I try to keep it from being “Cute Kid Photo of the Day,” but can’t always succeed:

SteelyKid helping the Pip make his Lego firefighter set.

The Pip also likes Lego sets, but the “junior” ones are still a little challenging for him to get together. So he enlisted his sister to help out.

That gets us to the 27th, the day before I left for South Carolina. Which is a nice natural breakpoint, so I’ll stop here, and do another catch-up post later.

Christmas 2015

Normally, I save a .jpg of our holiday card and post it here. This year, I forgot, but fortunately my parents have one, so you get a photo of a photo card:

The Chateau Steelypips photo card, 2015.

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, have a lovely Friday otherwise.

101-108/366: Catching Up

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last photo-a-day post, for a variety of reasons. First we were in Florida, then Emmy died, then I had some disk space issues that kept me from getting photos off my camera. That’s all sorted at last, just in time for me to leave town again…

In an effort to catch up a bit, I’m going to dump several photos at a time into a couple of posts. This one will be a total of eight days’ worth of pictures, covering our trip and a few days after. I’ve got several gigabytes of trip pictures, but almost all of those include the kids, and again, I’m trying not to have this be the “Cute Kid Photo of the Day,” so with one exception, I’ll keep it to things that aren’t them:

101/366: The one exception is this shot as we got on the plane to Florida:

SteelyKid and The Pip in their seats on the plane to Florida.

I like the way this basically captures their approach: SteelyKid waiting calmly for the point when she could pull out her tablet and watch cartoons, and The Pip so fired up I couldn’t keep him in focus.

102/366: The first day we were in Florida, we went up to the zoo in Tampa, where they do a special Christmas light show in the evenings in December:

The manatee fountain and Christmas lights at the zoo in Tampa.

I like the combination of the very Floridian manatee fountain and the incongruous lighted reindeer. I don’t quite know what I think they ought to do instead, but I always find the winter-based Christmas iconography kind of weird in Florida…

103/366: The next day, we went to the beach:

A gull soaring over a beach on the Gulf coast of Florida.

This was a little less of a contrast than in some past years– it was in the 60’s at home– but still nice to be at the beach in December.

104/366: The next day, we went on a cruise around the harbor in Port Charlotte looking for dolphins. We didn’t manage to find dolphins, but did see somebody flying a biplane, of all things:

A biplane in flight in Florida.

You don’t see that every day.

105/366: On our last day, we went and played a little miniature golf. The course was home to a substantial number of lizards, like this black-and-red guy spotted sunning himself:

A lizard on a rock at the miniature golf course.

106/366: On our return, SteelyKid had to finish her homework from the previous week, making a cardboard building to contribute to the model city her class was making:

SteelyKid’s toy factory.

She drew the windows and doors and so on while in Florida, on bits of card stock that I had cut to fit a couple of shoe boxes. We colored these at home before school on the first morning back, then taped them to the boxes. I think it came out pretty well, considering all the constraints we were working under…

107/366: The next day was the unveiling of the city, in SteelyKid’s second-grade classroom. I got a whole bunch of pictures, but they mostly include other people’s kids, and I make a point of not posting photos of other people’s kids if I can avoid it. So here’s the vote tally from when they decided on the name for their city:

Rejected names for “Friendship City” in SteelyKid’s second-grade class.

108/366: This was the Thursday after Emmy died on Tuesday night, and what with one thing and another, I didn’t take any photos that day. I could maybe fish something out of the extras from the others, but I did engage in a bit of visual art that day, so I’ll post these instead:

Some holiday silliness.

I was in a weird place, okay?

Anyway, that gets me a week closer to being caught up. Which I’ll promptly squander by going away for several days of Christmas festivities, but, you know, you take what you can get.

The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxAlbany on how quantum physics manifests in everyday life. I posted the approximate text back then, but TEDx has now put up the video:

So, if you’ve been wondering what it sounded like live, well, now you can see…

Memories of Emmy

SteelyKid’s second-grade teacher sent home a couple of books about kids dealing with the loss of beloved pets– one of which, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney is surprisingly atheistic. We read them at bedtime the other night, which was a little rough.

After we finished, and moved her to her bed (when it’s my turn to read to her, we do it in the master bedroom, because her bed is really uncomfortable for me), she said, sadly and quietly, “I miss Emmy.”

“I do, too, honey,” I said, in a less than perfectly steady voice. “She was the best.”

That got a smile, and she said “I remember you saying that in the silly voice.” And then I had to do the Silly Dog Voice (a sort of Andy-Kaufman-as-“Foreign-Guy” thing) for her, using Emmy’s catch phrase of “I’m the best!” And then SteelyKid cheered up, and chattered about a math game she was playing, or wants to play, or possibly was making up on the spot. It wasn’t really clear.

Anyway, in the same general spirit of trying to focus on the happy things, here are some scattered recollections from the last twelve years.

——

Emmy back in September, looking soulful.

The very first day I got Emmy, from the Mohawk-Hudson Humane Society, I took her out to the car, and opened the passenger side door. She climbed right in, and sat in the seat happily panting. When I started the engine, though, she immediately climbed into the back seat and lay down there. So whoever owned her first trained her very well.

They had apparently named her “Princess,” but that didn’t seem quite appropriate, so we changed it to “Emmy.” She took to this very quickly– that’s why I made it her real name in the introduction of the first book. At times she had a sort of aloof and superior air, though, so we joked that she saw the name change as a promotion. This led to her nickname: the Queen of Niskayuna.

The day I got her, we went to PetSmart to pick up supplies, because we didn’t have any dog stuff, really, just the cheap leash they’d given me to hold her at the shelter. I remember standing in the aisle of collars looking at the huge variety. Some kind passer-by pointed out the Martingale collars, which tighten a bit, but not as much as a full choke collar, and that seemed like a good idea. She also remarked “I think the red one would look really nice on her.” So other than a brief period where Emmy had chewed through her red collar on a day when the pet store only had blue ones in stock, she wore a red Martingale collar.

I also picked up a leash that day, a six-foot leather lead, which is the only leash we ever really used with her. We had a couple of others, but that one was my go-to. And when I cleaned out the dog stuff from the mud room (giving it away to a couple of people from work who needed dog gear), the two things I kept were her collar and that leash. They’re in a Ziploc bag on a shelf near my desk.

Those mystery previous owners had both house- and crate-trained Emmy before giving her up, which made our lives really easy in the early days. I got a crate at that same PetSmart stop, which turned out to be bigger than I probably should’ve gotten, almost comically oversized for her. The kids comfortably fit inside when playing hide-and-seek:

The Pip hiding inside Emmy’s crate, which I would like to emphasize was ENTIRELY HIS OWN IDEA.

In the first year or so that we had her, she picked up a couple of commands without us particularly trying. One of these was “time for bed,” which started because Kate and I would use it as shorthand with each other, asking “should we crate the dog and go to bed?” One night, one of us said “Time for bed?” and Emmy jumped up from where she was sitting near the couch, and trotted happily to her crate. From then on, we used “time for bed” to tell her to go there.

The other accidental command was “last call,” which we used to refer to letting her outside one last time before bed, usually around 10pm or so. This was a routine for several years, but as she got older, she got less enthusiastic about going out late at night. At some point, one cold winter night, we said “last call,” and Emmy dutifully trotted to the back door. When I opened the door, though, and the cold air blew in, she turned right around and went into her crate. And that was the end of “last call.” She never had a problem with peeing in her crate overnight, though, until the last few weeks, when her health was finally failing.

As she got older, she became decidedly less enthusiastic about going out in bad weather. The last couple of years, when I would open the door to let her out first thing in the morning, if she spotted rain falling (or even heard dripping from recent rain), she would turn right around and go back to the kitchen. “I don’t need to pee that badly, dude…” She’d still go out on a walk, somewhat reluctantly, but by the end of the walk, she’d be cheerfully stopping to sniff things while we both got soaked.

We did some training classes with her for a while (her catch phrase of “I’m the best” actually originated with the trainer), not so much because she needed the work on obedience, but in hopes of getting her a little more comfortable with being around other dogs. That didn’t really work, but she did learn some basic tricks– sit, down, wait, “flop,” “roll over.” She was always really good about those. We also had “easy” and “settle,” which were attempts to calm her down when she started freaking out about another dog. On walks, I would carry a bag of high-value treats to reward her when another dog went by without her getting too worked up, and she came to expect those even when she strained at the leash and raised her hackles.

(As a side note, a surprisingly large fraction of dog owners are utterly oblivious to dog signals. I can’t tell you how many times I had to warn people off from letting their dogs “just say hi” to Emmy, who would be standing stiffly, growling low, with her hackles up. “What part of this look says to you that my dog wants to ‘say hi’ to yours?” I always wanted to ask.)

We used to take really long walks, but the circuit gradually shrank as she got older, and the kids came along and ate into her humans’ spare time. We never did fewer than two walks a day, though, sometimes three if I was home during the afternoon. These were, obviously, great times for me to think about physics for the blogs and the books, though I grumbled a bit about the winter months when both morning and evening walks took place in the pitch dark and freezing cold.

She was always very happy hanging out in our back yard, and would spend spring and summer days shifting from lying in the sun to curling up in the shade of one particular tree right at the edge of the patio and now at the edge of the deck we added a couple of years ago. She was even pretty good about not straying too far on the several occasions when the gate to the yard failed to latch, allowing her out into the front. The most recent of these was a couple of months ago, when I let her out back, then sat down at my computer, which is right in front of the window looking out on our driveway. After a bit of typing, I half-consciously noticed a black shape nosing around the flower box, and thought “Boy, that’s a big cat; I’m surprised Emmy isn’t flipping out…” Then I spotted the red collar, and ran to the front door, where she met me, looking smug.

Yesterday, I gave away two milk crates worth of stuff, including a large number of chew toys. Ironically, these tended to pile up because she was harder on toys than any other dog I’ve seen. We tried every brand of “indestructible” squeaky toy out there, and never found one she couldn’t get open. Left to her own devices, she would settle down with a plush toy, and worry at it until she found the one weak point on a seam somewhere, and then allll the stuffing would come out, all over the living room. So we tended to let her play with these only briefly, before swapping the toy for a treat, and putting the toy in a basket in the mud room.

She did have a black Kong and what we called her “UFO,” a ball with a ridge around it made of the same black rubber stuff, with a hole through it sized to hold a dog treat. Those held up pretty well, though she managed to take chunks out of even that stuff. I couldn’t find the Kong when I did a sweep of the house the other day; I know I’ll trip over the damn thing at some point, and cry like a baby.

For most of her life, the house next door was occupied by a very nice family with three kids and no free-roaming pets (they had a rabbit they kept in a hutch on the far side of their yard, but I’m not sure Emmy ever really paid much attention to that). They moved away a couple of years ago, though, and the house was bought by a young couple who got a hyperactive black dog of some sort. Emmy regarded this as a great affront, and for a while, any time the two of them were outside at the same time, they would end up inches away from each other, growling and barking through the fence. Emmy eventually calmed down a bit, though the other dog didn’t really. Toward the end of this summer and early in the fall, when he would start barking at the fence, she’d look over at me as if to say “Can you believe this dog?”

(She’d still bark occasionally, and even go to the fence now and again, but only every third or fourth time.)

Despite the high-pitched voice I used for her– and I’m not sure why I picked that specific sound– she had a surprisingly deep bark. And a tendency to add a bit of a baying howl to it when startled. She broke that out most frequently when somebody would ring the doorbell– as a result, if we spotted the babysitter or a delivery person coming, we’d race to get the door open before they rang the bell. We referred to it as the “Fear! Fire! Foes!” bark, after the Horn of Buckland in the Lord of the Rings books. That was the centerpiece of one dialogue that I wrote that got cut from both of the dog-physics books, for length, though I eventually re-used the joke elsewhere.

If you’ve read our books, a lot of the dialogues in there are based on real incidents. She really did stare out the back window apparently looking for bunnies made of cheese, and sniff under my desk for steak dropped in another universe and all the rest. I tried to capture as much of her personality as I could (or, if you want to be picky, the human-like personality traits I read into dog actions that probably meant something else), and it’s a bit of a comfort to know that she’s got a certain literary immortality. Still, it’s going to be a good while before I feel up to re-reading any of that stuff. Somewhere down the line, though, I’ll pick up a copy, remember the Silly Dog Voice, and smile.

She was the best.

Emmy Orzel, 2002-2015

We lost the Queen of Niskayuna tonight. Emmy had been having some health issues for a while, and while we were in Florida this past weekend she wasn’t eating for the pet-sitter. We tried yet another new version of the new diet food today, with only limited success. And this afternoon, she fell going up the stairs, then again on the deck.

Our regular vet was near closing time, so they recommended going to a different veterinary hospital in the area, where they could do x-rays and ultrasounds as needed. And those revealed a large mass in her abdomen, from tumors in her liver and gall bladder. We might’ve been able to eke out another few weeks, but the only reason would’ve been to maybe have a slightly happier goodbye, and she was just too miserable to put her through that.

I spent a good while at the vet’s sobbing, because she was a great dog, and the best Emmy ever. And now I’m looking back at some very old pictures and remembering a dozen years with Her Majesty. This snowy photo from 2003 has always been one of my favorites:

Emmy in December 2003, only a few months after we got her.

(Her normal collar was red, but when we first got her, she had a habit of chewing through them, and thus there was a brief stretch when she wore a blue collar, because the pet store didn’t have any red ones that day…)

Because I’m usually the one behind the camera, I don’t have all that many photos of me and Emmy together. This is one of the best, from March of 2008:

Emmy and her Big Human, chilling out.

I had vaguely meant to do a picture for the photo-a-day project using the camera remote to get the two of us together; now I’m kicking myself for not getting to it soon enough.

Anyway, she was a great dog, and lived to a ripe old age by canine standards. We had twelve fun and eventful years with her, which is at once more than you can expect, and not nearly enough.

And I’m pretty much a wreck right now, so don’t expect much from me for a while.

On Sports Injury Rates, or Today in Why I’m Glad I’m Not a Social Scientist

The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days– the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don’t find the general ordering of things all that surprising.

There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between rates for girls’ and boys’ versions of the same sports. The chart Vox shows has girls’ soccer as the second-most dangerous high school sport in America, but boys’ soccer is all the way down in ninth place. And this pattern is consistent. So I copied their data and used it to make a bar graph of my own to highlight that:

Injury rates for boys and girls in equivalent high school sports.

The bars here are comparing injury rates for sports that are equivalent, or at least analogous– I tacked softball and baseball on at the end as approximately the same game, though each is played only by a single sex. The only sport for which the injury rate is higher for boys is lacrosse, and my extremely limited understanding is that the rules are rather different between the two, with much less contact allowed in the girls’ game.

Excluding lacrosse, softball, and baseball, the average ratio of girls’ injury rate to boys’ injury rate is 1.4+/-0.1. So female high-school athletes playing a given game are roughly 40% more likely to suffer an injury (“defined as anything that required the attention of a physician or athletic trainer, or kept the athlete off the field for at least one day” from Vox) than their male classmates playing the exact same game.

It’s a striking correlation, but what’s the causation? Well, this is the “I’m glad I’m not a social scientist” part, because as with any system involving more than about two atoms, it’s a hopeless muddle. Are girls more fragile than boys? More likely to report injury or less likely to try to play through pain? More likely to have their injuries treated as serious enough to count toward this statistic by coaches, athletic trainers, and sports-injury researchers? Probably all of those, to some degree.

I considered trying to bend this into a “Football Physics” post over at Forbes. But while it would be nearly as good clickbait there as at Vox, I would feel some obligation to try and draw a sensible conclusion or connect this to some sort of policy recommendation. And, you know, I’m on vacation in Florida (though currently taking a vacation from vacation-with-kids to do a bit of Internet writing).

So instead I’ll throw the graph up here, say “Huh. That’s odd,” and return to thinking about the simple interactions of small numbers of frictionless spheres.