{"id":295,"date":"2016-06-25T07:10:02","date_gmt":"2016-06-25T04:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/+JaniUusitalo\/posts\/WJEcRBP2v9K"},"modified":"2016-06-25T07:10:02","modified_gmt":"2016-06-25T04:10:02","slug":"20160625-postaus1-json","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/linkki\/295","title":{"rendered":"Link<\/title> <\/use> <\/svg>295"},"content":{"rendered":"

via Kaj Sotala<\/a>
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> In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon in what newspapers at the time described as \u201cthe greatest race of the century.\u201d Hayes\u2019s winning time, which set a world record for the marathon, was 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds.<\/p>\n

> Today, barely more than a century later, the world record for a marathon is 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds\u2014nearly 30 percent faster than Hayes\u2019s record time\u2014and if you\u2019re an eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male, you aren\u2019t even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon unless you\u2019ve run another marathon in less than 3 hours, 5 minutes. In short, Hayes\u2019s world-record time in 1908 would qualify him for today\u2019s Boston Marathon (which has about thirty thousand runners) but with not a lot to spare. <\/p>\n

> That same 1908 Summer Olympics saw a near disaster in the men\u2019s diving competition. One of the divers barely avoided serious injury while attempting a double somersault, and an official report released a few months later concluded that the dive was simply too dangerous and recommended that it be banned from future Olympic Games. Today the double somersault is an entry-level dive, with ten-year-olds nailing it in competitions, and by high school the best divers are doing four and a half somersaults. World-class competitors take it even further with dives such as \u201cthe Twister\u201d\u2014two and a half backward somersaults with two and a half twists added. It\u2019s difficult to imagine what those early-twentieth-century experts who found the double-somersault dive too dangerous would have thought about the Twister, but my guess is that they would have dismissed it as laughably impossible\u2014assuming, that is, that someone would have had the imagination and the audacity to suggest it in the first place. <\/p>\n

> In the early 1930s Alfred Cortot was one of the best-known classical musicians in the world, and his recordings of Chopin\u2019s \u201c24 \u00c9tudes\u201d were considered the definitive interpretation. Today teachers offer those same performances\u2014sloppy and marred by missed notes\u2014as an example of how not to play Chopin, with critics complaining about Cortot\u2019s careless technique, and any professional pianist is expected to be able to perform the \u00e9tudes with far greater technical skill and \u00e9lan than Cortot. Indeed, Anthony Tommasini, the music critic at the New York Times, once commented that musical ability has increased so much since Cortot\u2019s time that Cortot would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now. <\/p>\n

> In 1973 David Richard Spencer of Canada had memorized more digits of pi than any person before him: 511. Five years later, after a rapid-fire series of new records set by a handful of people competing to claim the memorization title, the record belonged to an American, David Sanker, who had committed 10,000 digits of pi to memory. In 2015, after another thirty-plus years of gains, the recognized title holder was Rajveer Meena of India, who had memorized the first 70,000 digits of pi\u2014an accumulation that took him 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite\u2014although Akira Haraguchi of Japan had claimed to have memorized an even more incredible 100,000 digits, or nearly two hundred times as many as anyone had memorized just forty-two years earlier.<\/p>\n

> These are not isolated examples. We live in a world full of people with extraordinary abilities\u2014abilities that from the vantage point of almost any other time in human history would have been deemed impossible. Consider Roger Federer\u2019s magic with a tennis ball, or the astounding vault that McKayla Maroney nailed in the 2012 Summer Olympics: a round-off onto the springboard, a back handspring onto the vault, and then a high, arching flight with McKayla completing two and a half twists before she landed firmly and with complete control on the mat. There are chess grandmasters who can play several dozen different games simultaneously\u2014while blindfolded\u2014and a seemingly unending supply of young musical prodigies who can do things on the piano, the violin, the cello, or the flute that would have astonished aficionados a century ago.<\/p>\n

> But while the abilities are extraordinary, there is no mystery at all about how these people developed them. They practiced. A lot. The world-record time in the marathon wasn\u2019t cut by 30 percent over the course of a century because people were being born with a greater talent for running long distances. Nor did the second half of the twentieth century see some sudden surge in the births of people with a gift for playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff or for memorizing tens of thousands of random digits.<\/p>\n

> What the second half of the twentieth century did see was a steady increase in the amount of time that people in different areas devoted to training, combined with a growing sophistication of training techniques. This was true in a huge number of fields, particularly highly competitive fields such as musical performance and dance, individual and team sports, and chess and other competitive games. This increase in the amount and sophistication of practice resulted in a steady improvement in the abilities of the performers in these various fields\u2014an improvement that was not always obvious from year to year but that is dramatic when viewed over the course of several decades.<\/p>\n

— Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via Kaj Sotala > In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon in what newspapers at the time described as \u201cthe greatest race of the century.\u201d Hayes\u2019s winning time, which set a world record for the marathon, was 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds. > Today, barely more than a century later, the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14097],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kettinki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}