The Giddy Summit: On Learning How to Surf

Researchers have often examined the difference between “external focus” and “internal focus” in the learning of new motor activities. An external focus is one in which your attention is directed to the effect you are having on or in relation to the external world; an internal focus is one in which your attention is directed to how your own body feels or is coordinated. If you are shooting a free throw in basketball and concentrate on how your wrist feels as you release the ball, your focus is internal. If you focus instead on the rim or the backboard or the basketball, your focus is external.

The leading proponent of the superiority of external focus in learning motor skills is a psychologist named Gabriele Wulf. She came to the idea in the late 1990s, not by theoretical cogitation but out of her own experience learning how to windsurf. As she describes in her review of fifteen years of research on motor learning and attentional focus, she was struck by how changing her focus while attempting a windsurfing maneuver produced a marked difference in her performance: “While practicing a power jibe, I found that directing attention to the position of my feet, the pressure they were exerting on the board to change its direction, or the location of my hands on the boom, resulted in many failed attempts and frequent falls into the water over several hours of practice. With the spontaneous decision to simply focus on the tilt of the board while turning came instantaneous success.” (...)

I emailed Dr. Wulf after I’d begun my quest to learn how to surf. She wrote back quickly and decisively: “I have no doubt that a focus on the surfboard would be more effective than any focus on body movements.” Buoyed by her confident declaration, and feeling that I now had the authority of scientific kinesiology at my disposal, I returned to the water. But either my focus remained insufficiently external, or I was focusing on the wrong part of the surfboard; my frustration was relieved only by the pleasure I took in observing the pelicans dive-bombing for fish in long, elegant arcs, or the stately procession of dorsal fins as dolphins swam parallel to the shore, just beyond the break. I was accumulating “time in the water,” which might eventually translate into the physical reality of surfing waves. (...)

After I had reached the point of being able to stand up in the whitewater and it came time to go out beyond the break, where real surfing actually took place, a profound frustration set in, which I suspect is common to many beginning surfers. One of two failures usually took place: either I could not generate sufficient speed to catch the wave, and pounded at the water helplessly as wave after wave passed me by; or (to compensate for the first failure), I slid up on the board to generate more speed and shift my weight forward, and thus found myself constantly “pearling,” or digging the nose of the board into the water, which led to a head-over-heels wipeout that was often frightening. Caught between these two extremes, which seemed to represent hydrological physics conspiring against my success, I nearly cracked and gave up. There were middle-aged men with potbellies who took off effortlessly and gave me slightly pitying looks as I flailed about, fit but helpless in a foreign world.

One day in late summer I remember as particularly awful. I’d gone to a spot slightly farther north that had been recommended as friendlier to beginning surfers, and the conditions looked favorable. Two hours in the water produced not a single ride, and my shoulders ached from the buildup of lactic acid. I came out of the water convinced that this had now become an impossible task, that I was too old or had some East Coast, neurotic gene that prevented me from catching waves. I had reached what the philosopher William James, in an essay on the sources of human energy and second winds, called the “fatigue-obstacle.”

by The Giddy Summit |  Read more:

Image: szeke via Compfight cc

via:

via: New Yorker

via:

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Chega De Saudade

Saudade is a Portuguese or Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return. A stronger form ofsaudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing.

Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one's children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.

via: Wikipedia |  Read more:

Peeling the Onion

In early July, hacker Jacob Appelbaum and two other security experts published a blockbuster story in conjunction with the German press. They had obtained leaked top secret NSA documents and source code showing that the surveillance agency had targeted and potentially penetrated the Tor Network, a widely used privacy tool considered to be the holy grail of online anonymity.

Internet privacy activists and organizations reacted to the news with shock. For the past decade, they had been promoting Tor as a scrappy but extremely effective grassroots technology that can protect journalists, dissidents and whistleblowers from powerful government forces that want to track their every move online. It was supposed to be the best tool out there. Tor’s been an integral part of EFF’s “Surveillance Self-Defense” privacy toolkit. Edward Snowden is apparently a big fan, and so is Glenn Greenwald, who says it “allows people to surf without governments or secret services being able to monitor them.”

But the German exposé showed Tor providing the opposite of anonymity: it singled out users for total NSA surveillance, potentially sucking up and recording everything they did online.

To many in the privacy community, the NSA’s attack on Tor was tantamount to high treason: a fascist violation of a fundamental and sacred human right to privacy and free speech.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes Tor to be “essential to freedom of expression.” Appelbaum — a Wikileaks volunteer and Tor developer — considers volunteering for Tor to be a valiant act on par with Hemingway or Orwell “going to Spain to fight the Franco fascists” on the side of anarchist revolutionaries.

It’s a nice story, pitting scrappy techno-anarchists against the all-powerful US Imperial machine. But the facts about Tor are not as clear cut or simple as these folks make them out to be…

Let’s start with the basics: Tor was developed, built and financed by the US military-surveillance complex. Tor’s original — and current — purpose is to cloak the online identity of government agents and informants while they are in the field: gathering intelligence, setting up sting operations, giving human intelligence assets a way to report back to their handlers — that kind of thing. This information is out there, but it’s not very well known, and it’s certainly not emphasized by those who promote it. (...)

The origins of Tor go back to 1995, when military scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory began developing cloaking technology that would prevent someone’s activity on the Internet from being traced back to them. They called it “onion routing” — a method redirecting traffic into a parallel peer-to-peer network and bouncing it around randomly before sending it off to its final destination. The idea was to move it around so as to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination, and make it impossible for someone to observe who you are or where you’re going on the Internet.

Onion routing was like a hustler playing the three-card monte with your traffic: the guy trying to spy on you could watch it going under one card, but he never knew where it would come out. (...)

The original goal of onion routing wasn’t to protect privacy — or at least not in the way most people think of “privacy.” The goal was to allow intelligence and military personnel to work online undercover without fear of being unmasked by someone monitoring their Internet activity. (...)

In the 90s, as public Internet use and infrastructure grew and multiplied, spooks needed to figure out a way to hide their identity in plain sight online. An undercover spook sitting in a hotel room in a hostile country somewhere couldn’t simply dial up CIA.gov on his browser and log in — anyone sniffing his connection would know who he was. Nor could a military intel agent infiltrate a potential terrorist group masquerading as an online animal rights forum if he had to create an account and log in from an army base IP address.

That’s where onion routing came in. As Michael Reed, one of the inventors of onion routing, explained: providing cover for military and intelligence operations online was their primary objective; everything else was secondary: (...)

Very early on, researchers understood that just designing a system that only technically anonymizes traffic is not enough — not if the system is used exclusively by military and intelligence. In order to cloak spooks better, Tor needed to be used by a diverse group of people: Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, foreign agents, terrorists — the more diverse the group that spooks could hide in the crowd in plain sight.

by Yasha Levine, PandoDaily |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Say Yes to Undress

In case you missed the news that traditional courtship is dead, naked people on VH1 stand ready to enlighten you. And in case you thought that television networks had evolved beyond trying to attract viewers with cheesy titillation — ditto.

Yes, it’s time for “Dating Naked,” a reality series beginning Thursday on VH1 in which just-introduced strangers looking for love are nude from the get-go. This comes nine days after the new FYI channel, an A&E offshoot, introduced “Married at First Sight,” in which strangers paired by supposed experts begin their relationship by marrying, then decide whether they like each other.

Both shows are probably inevitable next steps in television’s endless effort to capitalize on the human need to pair up, which stretches back to “The Dating Game” of the 1960s and runs through “The Bachelor,” “The Millionaire Matchmaker” and odd variations like “It Takes a Church.”

The two new entries are, of course, outrageous affronts to the style of courtship that has served humanity quite well for millenniums, if you don’t count the dismaying frequency of divorce and resulting psychological damage to all involved. The shows are taking what used to be the long-term goal — getting married or seeing someone naked or both — and making it the starting point. As Chrissy, one of the geniuses in the first episode of “Dating Naked,” notes: “It is awkward meeting someone naked. I mean, usually you wait till sex.”

But we will not here debate what these shows say about the state of modern life, with its immediate-gratification mentality, lack of modesty and self-restraint, and general tastelessness. What concerns us here is that no one seems to have thought through the economic implications of what these fatuous shows represent, specifically the inexorable march toward television that is all nude, all the time.

“Dating Naked” won’t seem all that scandalous to inhabitants of the texting generation, for whom sharing photos of their naughty bits is now routine. The series is just a continuation of a tawdry show-it-all TV trend that began a year or so ago when reality series involving nude castaways (“Naked and Afraid”), nude real estate transactions (“Buying Naked”) and nude body painting (“Naked Vegas”) began turning up.

Factor in the endorsement of random coupling implied by “Dating Naked” and “Married at First Sight,” and we as a species are now lower on both the sartorial and the evolutionary scales than some penguins, which practice courtship rituals leading to committed relationships and have plumage that at least looks vaguely like clothing.

by Neil Genzlinger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Naked Dating

Johnny Winter (February,1944 – July, 2014)

Sun Records chieftain Sam Phillips described the voice of his pre-Elvis discovery Howlin’ Wolf as a sound from “where the soul of man never dies.” For young John Dawson Winter III, the blend of gravel, whiskey, mud, and madness in Wolf’s singing unearthed a well he still draws from 60 years later.

“‘Somebody Walking in My Home’ by Howlin’ Wolf is the first blues song I remember hearing,” Johnny Winter recalls. “I was in my bedroom listening to the transistor radio, and right from the beginning I knew blues was it for me. It had so much feeling. I just loved it. And I could really relate to the black experience. Most people in Texas didn’t like black people because they were too dark, and they didn’t like me because I was too white. I got that even when I was 12 and started playing guitar. By then I knew blues was what I wanted to play, and I still come at it from an emotional perspective—not technical.”

Nonetheless, it was the conflagrant intensity of Winter’s two-fingered picking, the bared-fang snarl of his tone, and the mix of sand and kerosene in his own voice that skyrocketed him from the Texas psychedelic club scene into the international music spotlight less than a year after he recorded his debut, The Progressive Blues Experiment, on the stage of Austin’s Vulcan Gas Company in 1968. By the end of 1969 he’d released his major-label debut, Johnny Winter, and the follow-up, Second Winter, and played Woodstock, laying out blueprints for the future of American blues-rock and even Southern rock.

Although Winter is currently enjoying a surprising late-career renaissance thanks to his recharged stage presence, a documentary film, and a spate of releases, it’s the images of him from 1969 to 1974 that are burned into the retina of rock history: rail thin and wrapped like a spider around the 1963 Gibson Firebird that still accompanies him onstage, wraith-like thanks to his albinism and long hair, literally attacking the strings.

by Ted Drozdowski, Premier Guitar | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Criss Canning, Square-Fruited Mallee Gum
via:

Should We Mourn the End of Blogs?

Remember blogging? That quaint, old-fashioned hobby of keeping a regular, text-based online journal about your life and interests? Remember how blogs used to allow reader comments, and were archived in reverse-date order?

It was my friend’s younger brother who first introduced me to blogging in 2004, writing the Blogger URL on a paper napkin at a party. He and his friends formed the nucleus of my new online community.

But as I settle into my porch rocking chair 10 years later, tucking my crocheted rug a little more snugly around my withered old legs, I don’t even have to yell at the Kids of Today to get off my lawn. They don’t blog anymore.

Indeed, most of the personal blogs I once followed have vanished, or haven’t been updated in months or years. The blogroll in my sidebar reads like an honour roll of war dead. But I keep on blogging because, compared to tweeting for thousands of followers or posting to hundreds of Facebook friends, the single-digit pageviews my blog now attracts are a paradoxically private way to express myself.

The melancholy ruins of this digital Pompeii recall The Onion’s joke about internet archaeologists excavating the lost "Friendster" civilisation. But just as Friendster users migrated to MySpace and then to Facebook, teenagers are now fleeing Facebook to get away from their embarrassing older relatives.

So, where should we go nowadays for an instant hit of youthiness?WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine. (...)

Blogging persists, of course. But it’s mostly for adults – professionalised to the point where the old "bloggers vs journalists" debates now seem hopelessly quaint. Maintaining a personal blog has become entrepreneurial: a job that earns an income through display advertising, network marketing, ebooks and blog-to-book deals.

Concomitantly, blogging has indelibly influenced mainstream news reporting, which is now much more immediate, informal, link-rich and inclusive of reader comments. When I taught online journalism at Monash University from 2009-11, students published their assignments on WordPress blogs.

So for young people, blogs are work, not play. A 2008 Pew research project found that while 85% of 12 to 17-year-olds engaged in electronic personal communication (including texting, email, instant messaging and commenting on social media), 60% didn’t consider these texts to be "writing". Another study in 2013 revealed that teenagers still distinguish between the "proper" writing they do for school (which may be on blogs) and their informal, social communication.

By contrast, my fondness for prose – and my disgusted CLOSE TAB when an interesting link turns out to be, ugh, a video – marks me as a digital fogey. I didn’t get Tumblr for the longest time. Why were people just reblogging other people’s posts?

by Mel Campbell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anatoli Babi/Alamy

Fred Cuming
via:

Andrew Archer
via:

The Elephant in the Discotheque: The Bee Gees

The Bee Gees’ dominance of the charts in the disco era was above and beyond Chic, Giorgio Moroder, even Donna Summer. Their sound track to Saturday Night Fever sold thirty million copies. They were responsible for writing and producing eight of 1978’s number ones, something only Lennon and McCartney in 1963/64 could rival—and John and Paul hadn’t been the producers, only the writers. Even given the task of writing a song called “Grease” (“Grease is the word, it’s got groove, it’s got a meaning,” they claimed, hoping no one would ask, “Come again?”), they came up with a classic. At one point in March they were behind five singles in the American Top 10. In 1978 they accounted for 2 percent of the entire record industry’s profits. The Bee Gees were a cultural phenomenon.

Three siblings from an isolated, slightly sinister island off the coast of northwest England, already in their late twenties by the time the Fever struck—how the hell did they manage this? Pinups in the late sixties, makers of the occasional keening ballad hit in the early seventies, the Bee Gees had no real contact with the zeitgeist until, inexplicably, they had hits like “Nights on Broadway,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” and the zeitgeist suddenly seemed to emanate from them. This happened because they were blending white soul, R&B, and dance music in a way that suited pretty much every club, every radio station, every American citizen in 1978. They melded black and white influences into a more satisfying whole than anyone since Elvis. Simply, they were defining pop culture in 1978.

Like ABBA, there is a well of melancholic emotion, even paranoia, in the Bee Gees’ music. Take “How Deep Is Your Love” (no. 1, ’77), with its warm bath of Fender Rhodes keyboards and echoed harmonies that camouflage the cries of the lyric: “We’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be … How deep is your love? I really need to know.” Or “Words,” with its romantic but strangely seclusionist “This world has lost its glory. Let’s start a brand-new story now, my love.” Or “Night Fever,” their ’78 number one, with its super-mellow groove and air-pumped strings masking the high anxiety of Barry Gibb’s vocal; the second verse is indecipherable, nothing but a piercing wail with the odd phrase—“I can’t hide!”—peeking through the cracks. It is an extraordinary record.

Total pop domination can have fierce consequences. Elvis had been packed off to the army; the Beatles had received Ku Klux Klan death threats—the Bee Gees received the mother of all backlashes, taking the full brunt of the anti-disco movement. Radio stations announced “Bee Gee–free weekends”; a comedy record called “Meaningless Songs in Very High Voices” by the HeeBeeGeeBees became a UK radio hit. Their 1979 album Spirits Having Flown had sold sixteen million copies and spawned three number-one singles (“Too Much Heaven,” “Tragedy,” “Love You Inside Out”); the singles from 1981’s Living Eyes—“He’s a Liar” and the title track—reached thirty and forty-five on the chart respectively, and didn’t chart in Britain at all. Almost overnight, nobody played Bee Gees records on the radio, and pretty much nobody bought them. The biggest group in the world at the end of 1978 went into enforced retirement three years later. Could they rise again? Of course they could.

by Bob Stanley, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

What Happens to Your Online Account When You Die?

You've probably decided who gets the house or that family heirloom up in the attic when you die. But what about your email account and all those photos stored online?

Grieving relatives might want access for sentimental reasons, or to settle financial issues. But do you want your mom reading your exchanges on an online dating profile or a spouse going through every email?

The Uniform Law Commission, whose members are appointed by state governments to help standardize state laws, on Wednesday endorsed a plan that would give loved ones access to - but not control of - the deceased's digital accounts, unless specified otherwise in a will.

To become law in a state, the legislation would have to be adopted by the legislature. If it did, a person's online life could become as much a part of estate planning as deciding what to do with physical possessions.

"This is something most people don't think of until they are faced with it. They have no idea what is about to be lost," said Karen Williams of Beaverton, Oregon, who sued Facebook for access to her 22-year-old son Loren's account after he died in a 2005 motorcycle accident.

The question of what to do with one's "digital assets" is as big as America's electronic footprint. A person's online musings, photos and videos - such as a popular cooking blog or a gaming avatar that has acquired a certain status online - can be worth considerable value to an estate. Imagine the trove of digital files for someone of historical or popular note - say former President Bill Clinton or musician Bob Dylan - and what those files might fetch on an auction block.

"Our email accounts are our filing cabinets these days," said Suzanne Brown Walsh, a Cummings & Lockwood attorney who chaired the drafting committee on the proposed legislation. But "if you need access to an email account, in most states you wouldn't get it."

But privacy activists are skeptical of the proposal. Ginger McCall, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said a judge's approval should be needed for access, to protect the privacy of both the owners of accounts and the people who communicate with them.

"The digital world is a different world" from offline, McCall said. "No one would keep 10 years of every communication they ever had with dozens or even hundreds of other people under their bed."

Many people assume they can decide what happens by sharing certain passwords with a trusted family member, or even making those passwords part of their will. But in addition to potentially exposing passwords when a will becomes public record, anti-hacking laws and most companies' "terms of service" agreements prohibit anyone from accessing an account that isn't theirs. That means loved ones technically are prohibited from logging onto a dead person's account.

Several tech providers have come up with their own solutions. Facebook, for example, will "memorialize" accounts by allowing already confirmed friends to continue to view photos and old posts. Google, which runs Gmail, YouTube and Picasa Web Albums, offers its own version: If people don't log on after a while, their accounts can be deleted or shared with a designated person. Yahoo users agree when signing up that their accounts expire when they do.

But the courts aren't convinced that a company supplying the technology should get to decide what happens to a person's digital assets. In 2005, a Michigan probate judge ordered Yahoo to hand over the emails of a Marine killed in Iraq after his parents argued that their son would have wanted to share them. Likewise, a court eventually granted Williams, the Oregon mother, access to her son's Facebook account, although she says the communications appeared to be redacted.

by Anne Flaherty, AP |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Lauren Gambino

via:

via:

Brenda Cablayan, Makawao Suburbia
via:

How Truvada Could Revolutionize Gay Life and Reawaken Old Arguments

Gabriel and his friends like to go dancing at places in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen like Viva and Pacha. One night last winter, they ended up at a downtown club hosting a circuit party, a huge gay rave with throbbing, industrial house music. The theme was leather and S&M, and Gabriel* wore a singlet. He’s usually the least interested in drinking of the group­—he’s the responsible planner—but as the night wore on, he wound up becoming very drunk and very high and making out with lots of men. “I was feeling the fantasy of it all,” he says. A couple he vaguely knew grabbed him. They wanted to do more, insistently. Gabriel resisted at first and then, he says, decided to just give in to the spirit of the evening. It felt, at the time, freeing and hedonistic.

But he hadn’t been wearing a condom when they had sex, and in the morning, he woke up wanting nothing more than to regain control over that moment. Gabriel is a 32-year-old real-estate broker. He had tested negative for HIV the last time he’d been to a clinic. Terrified that might change, he went to Callen-Lorde, a health clinic in Chelsea, where he was placed on a 28-day course of a full HIV-medication regimen. When taken within three days of exposure, it dramatically reduces the chances of infection—something like the morning-after pill for HIV. Gabriel didn’t react well to the course: He felt nauseous and drained the whole time.

He never wanted to go through that again—neither the physical or the psychological anguish. So Gabriel got a prescription from his doctor for Truvada. Truvada is a ten-year-old HIV-treatment pill that, in 2012, quietly became the first drug to be approved by the FDA for a new use: to prevent HIV infection. The drug has the potential to dramatically alter the sexual behavior—and psychology—of a generation. When taken every day, it’s been shown in a major study to be up to 99 percent effective. For Gabriel, it was like switching to birth control instead of Plan B.

Several months after starting the drug, Gabriel says it’s allowed him to be bolder and more unapologetic in his desires, to have the kind of joyfully promiscuous, liberated sex that men enjoyed with one another in the decade or so after the Stonewall riots brought gay life out from the shadows and before the AIDS crisis shrouded it in new, darker ones.

For some men, Truvada’s new use seems just as revolutionary for sex as it is for medicine. “I’m not scared of sex for the first time in my life, ever. That’s been an adrenaline rush,” says Damon L. Jacobs, 43, a therapist who has chronicled his own experience with the drug on Facebook so enthusiastically that some assume Gilead, the drug’s manufacturer, must be paying him. (It’s not, say both he and Gilead.)  (...)

For the past several years, the conversation about gay life has been, to a large degree, a conversation about gay marriage. This summer—on social media, on Fire Island, at the Christopher Street pier, and in certain cohorts around the ­country—what many gay men are talking about among themselves is Truvada. And what’s surprising them is how fraught the conversation can be. For some, like Jacobs, the advent of this drug is nothing short of miraculous, freeing bodies and minds. For doctors, public-health officials, and politicians, it is a highly promising tool for stopping the spread of HIV.

But for others, a drug that can alleviate so much anxiety around sex is itself a source of concern. They worry that Truvada will invite men to have as much condom­less sex as they want, which could lead to a rise in diseases like syphilis. Or they fret that not everyone will take it as religiously as they ought to, reducing its effectiveness and maybe even creating resistance to the drug if those users later become HIV-positive and need it for treatment. And just as the birth-control pill caused single women in the sixties to wonder whether they’d be seen as “sluts” and to internalize that real and imagined shame, some gay men wonder how Truvada will play in the straight world; it sends a strikingly different message from the one in the “Sunday Styles” wedding announcements. Other gay men worry that the very existence of such a drug is a kind of betrayal: of those who’ve died in the epidemic; of fealty to the condom, an object alternately evoking fear and resilience, hot sex and safe-sex fatigue; and of a mind-set of sexual prudence that has governed gay-male life since the early ’80s. Even after treatments for HIV made it a manageable disease for many, gay men have absorbed the message that a latex sheath is all that stands between them and the abyss. Meaning not only HIV infection but everything it implies: loss of self-control and personal dignity, abdication of civic responsibility.

by Tim Murphy, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Ryan Pfluger. Grooming by Susan Donoghue for Ennis Inc with Chanel Product

Foul Territory

Baseball is many things: an institution, a tradition, an obsession. It is also achingly boring to watch. Last year, the Wall Street Journal looked at three Major League Baseball games and timed how much real activity occurred in each. The findings? Although a typical baseball game stretches past three hours, the actual action in a game—moments like hits and runs and fielding—totals just eighteen minutes. And so, over the endless minutes of nothing, fans are fed distractions: food and beer, of course, but also absurd chants, mascot foot races, the wave, the Jumbotron. By the time Melky Cabrera came to bat in the bottom of the fourth that night, the Fletchers had already seen themselves on the seven-story screen three times.

Today Cabrera plays for the Toronto Blue Jays, but four seasons ago he was a Brave. The team roster listed him as six feet, 210 pounds. A switch-hitter, he was batting left-handed against right-handed reliever Elmer Dessens from the Mets. On the first pitch to Cabrera, Dessens threw an 88-mile-per-hour fastball on the inside part of the plate.

Cabrera’s swing, so quick and effortless as to seem almost an afterthought, connected solid but late. On the telecast, the ball disappears from the screen as if it were never there.

How fast was it going? We don’t know for sure, but a line drive from a major league batter can easily exceed 100 miles per hour. We know some other things. We know that a baseball weighs five ounces. We know that force equals mass times acceleration. We know that Fred Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter, whom he will identify only as “A,” was sitting precisely 144 feet from home plate. The laces on her sneakers were knotted in neat bows. And she—well, not just she, but everyone around her—had less than one second to react to Cabrera’s line drive.

Less than one second.

If price connotes quality, then the best seats at Turner Field are in the SunTrust Club, a luxury section that has its own VIP entrance, full bar, chef stations, and the closest seats to home plate. They start at the inside edge of the visitors’ dugout and circle around to the start of the Braves’ dugout. Behind the SunTrust seats, occupying a narrower section, are the Henry Aaron seats, protected by a net. Similar setups can be found at virtually every other major (and minor) league park in America, simply because the spectators behind home plate are believed to be the most exposed to errant bats and balls.

The next best seats at Turner Field would be in sections like 116L, behind the dugouts, where the Fletcher family sat that night. You might argue these seats are even better than the ones behind home plate because there’s no netting between you and the action. (...)

At a typical major league game, between thirty-five and forty batted balls fly into the stands. For many fans, this is as much a part of the experience as beer and peanuts. They bring their weathered gloves and wait for a ball to loop lazily in the sky before plummeting toward the seats.

Line drive foul balls are different. In humans, there is no such thing as an “instant” response; what we see must be interpreted by the brain, and that process can take a tenth of a second. If a ball is traveling at 100 miles per hour, it will have already covered a dozen feet before you even realize it’s headed toward you. That, of course, assumes you’re actually paying attention.

by Christine Van Dusen, Atlanta Magazine |  Read more:

Image: John E. McDonald

José Basso, Campo Verde Bajo las Estrellas
[ed. From the article: How to Unmarry Your Wife]