Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records

Unable to find a webpage that had all this material easily available, I decided to make one.

The table below contains track & field world record information taken from Wikipedia. On the left is the current women's world record. On the right is the first historical men's world record that surpassed today's best female performance. (The list is limited to those events that have a world record progression page on Wikipedia.)

Current Women's Record		Historical Men's Record
100m Florence Griffith Joyner 10.49	1988	Charlie Paddock 10.4	1921
4 x 100m East Germany 41.37	1985	United States 41.0	1924
800m Jarmila Kratochvílová 1:53.28	1983	Ted Meredith 1:51.9	1912*
1500m Qu Yunxia 3:50.46	1993	Jules Ladoumegue 3:49.2	1930
1 Mile Svetlana Masterkova 4:12.56	1996	Paavo Nurmi 4:10.4	1923
3000m Wang Junxia 8:06:11	1993	Gunder Hägg 8:01.2	1942
5000m Tirunesh Dibaba 14:11.15	2008	Taisto Maki 14:08.8	1939
10000m Wang Junxia 29:31.78	1993	Emil Zátopek 29:28.2	1949
Marathon Paula Radcliffe 2:15:25	2003	Sergey Popov 2:15:17	1958
High Jump Stefka Kostadinova 2.09m	1987	Lester Steers 2.10m	1941
Long Jump Galina Chistyakova 7.52m	1988	Peter O'Connor 7.61m	1901*
Triple Jump Inessa Kravets 15.50m	1995	Daniel Ahearn 15.52m	1911
Pole Vault Yelena Isinbayeva 5.01m	2005	John Pennel 5.05m	1963

* There is no men's record on the Wikipedia world record progression page that would be defeated by today's female world record holder. The entry listed is the first world record recognized in the world record progression page.

Subsequently:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II


See Also:
Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz (comparing Spitz's performance against today's female records)

Unequal Amendments

All men may be created equal—but not all laws are.

Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787–90, the venerable document has been amended 27 times, but from a legal point of view not all of these amendments are equally important. Some amendments, such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, come up again and again in judicial opinions and legal scholarship. Other amendments, such as setting January 20 as the date of presidential inaugurations (the Twentieth Amendment), have rarely come up in litigation or commentary.

Having just graduated from law school, we here at Sauntering decided to produce a visual representation of the vast differences in relative importance of the amendments. What follows is a picture of all amendments written out in a font size corresponding to the relative citation frequency in Supreme Court and federal appellate court opinions. (To get a larger version, click on the image.)

Bill of Rights (First 10 Amendments)

All 27 Amendments

Our Methodology

To get the number of citations of each amendment, we searched AltLaw for “First [Second, etc.] Amendment” and “1st [2nd, etc.] Amendment.” This strategy means that we missed citations to “Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” etc.

Furthermore, although AltLaw’s database contains all U.S. Supreme Court opinions back to 1791, it contains only those U.S. Court of Appeals opinions published since 1950. Therefore, we have attempted to account for this by adjusting the citation numbers for the post-1950 amendments.

To deemphasize the immense citation difference between the major and minor amendments, we made the font sizes proportional to the square roots of the citation numbers.

For those readers with more than a passing interest in this little project, feel free to check out our raw data [Google Doc].

A final note: Although I came up with the idea of representing the amendments with font sizes, Sauntering founder and co-blogger Andy did the heavy lifting to research the amendment frequencies and come up with the visual display. Kudos to Andy!

Goodnight nobody Goodnight mush

I think it's my current familiarity with the original that makes this parody seem so entertaining. There's a look-inside preview of the book on the site and they've done a good job of copying the meter and the imagery of the children's classic.

This book appears to skirt the unprotected realm of satire, and I'm not sure that a suit on the book would come out differently than Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books, 109 F.3d 1394 (9th Cir. 1997), where the court found that a book using the imagery of Dr. Seuss to riff on the O.J. Simpson trial constituted copyright and trademark infringement. Alternatively, a court might find the send-up of Goodnight Moon to be direct enough to qualify as a fair use parody under U.S. copyright laws.

If there were a lawsuit pitting the owners of Goodnight Moon against Goodnight Bush, it wouldn't be the first time that disharmony visited the Goodnight brand. The most recent scrape occurred in 2005, when HarperCollins faced a minor bookseller revolt after the 60^th anniversary edition of the book included an image of illustrator Clement Hurd on the book jacket with a cigarette airbrushed out of his hand.

What I'll Miss About New York: #17 — The Carless Life

They overcharge you for the extra tank of gas at the rental car agency. Well, really, they don't overcharge you, but you have to bring it back completely empty in order to take advantage of their faux discount. C'mon: Who brings a car back to the rental agency completely empty?

So I buy the extra tank of gas right before I return the rental car when we're on vacation or attending someone's wedding — however, other than these occasions, I haven't bought a tank of gas in three years. You see, I don't have a car.

I know people who live in Manhattan and have automobiles. These friends aren't necessarily rich – it's just that they're comfortable paying for a luxury that is altogether unnecessary in this borough. And luxury it is. You can have a monthly parking spot (if one is available) across the street from my apartment for a paltry $800 per month. As reported in the New York Times, spaces further downtown push well into the six figures.

A few months ago, I noted that there are lessons to be learned when you don't have a car. First on that list is that you don't ever buy more than $40 worth of groceries because, well, you can't carry them. Your trunk is whatever you can carry in your own two hands, so don't go buying multiple hams.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

A city needs two elements before most of its residents are comfortable going without a car. First, it needs the requisite density. It's easy for me to go without a car because the 100 yard radius around my apartment contains 2 grocery stores, 2 banks, 2 drug stores, a clothing store that my wife is convinced is a front for the mob, one of the best Jewish delis in the world, and 5 restaurants including a bakery, a Dunkin Donuts, and a Starbucks. I just don't need to have a car to get the stuff I need on a regular basis.

The second element that the city needs is a commitment to public transit. Of the cities I've visited, only New York really gets this — even if San Francisco and Chicago understand to a lesser extent. A commitment to transit improves the lives of all citizens, but it especially lightens the load of the lower middle class and the working poor.

In the Bay Area, folks in a lower socio-economic tier who desire to be homeowners move to places hither and yon from their place of employment. Though they might work in Palo Alto, they'll live in Tracy — a city that Google maps claims is "1 hour and 10 minutes" away. During commute times, I'd be shocked if you made the trip in under 2 hours each way.

Compare this commute with someone living in the outer boroughs yet working in Manhattan. Someone living in Rockaway Park might have a commute of a similar time duration if they work in Manhattan, but they're not driving. No $4.00 gas. No focusing on the road. Wanna read, work, or do the crossword puzzle? Be my guest.


Beyond benefits to the less affluent, not having a car benefits everybody. It means that you're going to interact with people during your daily commute and your errands. There's simply no avoiding it. You're not rolling around in a metal box with wheels — you're on the sidewalk, trying to stay out of the way of other people with your $40 of groceries, rubbing elbows with rich and poor, neighbors and strangers alike. No one rides first class on the subway and the sidewalk does not have a "Yuppies Only" section (Wait, that's Park Slope, isn't it?).

By October, we'll have a car. Hell, we'll have two. And I'll enjoy having a car again. Buying more groceries. The mobility to head off in any direction I desire. But in returning to the John Wayne Yankee car culture, I'll lose something that I had these past few years hoofing it with my fellow New Yorkers.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Life Before Roe

As a developmental biologist (albeit one working strictly with invertebrates), I spend a lot of time looking at developing embryos and trying to figure out, at both a philosophical and biological level, when the little egg in my microscope stops being an egg and starts being a little sea urchin/sea star/tunicate/worm/whatever. The consequences of these musings have relevance for debates about abortions in humans and that age-old question of when life begins. Someday I'll say something more about this. But what I rarely consider is the other half of the equation, namely what is it like for the parents who have to choose whether or not to allow an embryo to make that murky transition between ball of cells and a human life.

An essay today in the New York Times addresses that question, in not so many words, far better than I could have. I encourage you to have a look.

What I'll Miss About New York: #18 — Occasional Brooklyn

I won't pretend that I visited Brooklyn frequently during these past three years. Truth be told, I think I visited the borough maybe a dozen times. I could blame law school for keeping me away from Brooklyn, but I think that travel time is the greater culprit. On the weekends (when I'm most likely to harass friends living there), the exclusively-local-running subway trains translate into a trip of greater than an hour each way. Of course, the trip is longer if there are glitches in the system. (Note: There are always glitches in the system.)

So I've been to Brooklyn only as many times as I've been to LA. Yet, I'm comfortable passing judgment on LA (Verdict: I hated it until visit #9. Now it's like the cousin whom you appreciate for who he is.), so I guess I'm comfortable opining on Brooklyn.

In a nutshell, Brooklyn is to Manhattan as San Jose is to San Francisco. That is, if San Jose were cool.

You see, although San Francisco captures the public's imagination, it's San Jose and the communities that surround it that really supply the engine driving the Bay Area economy. Google, Apple, eBay, Yahoo, HP, Cisco, Venture capitalists and start-ups A thru Z — are they in San Francisco? Not even close. They're all tightly clustered in the area around San Jose.

San Jose – the more populous of the two cities by 100,000 – is as bitter as a rural Pennsylvania voter, forced as it is to linger in the shadow of San Francisco. Yet, there's a reason that San Francisco came out on top of this sibling rivalry. For all San Jose's economic might, San Francisco has that certain je ne sais quoi that San Jose is most definitely lacking. San Francisco is a global city, brimming with culture and sustaining its own distinct lifestyle. It is a beautiful city populated with strange and fascinating people. The greater San Jose region? Well, it is home to low-slung offices and worker bees. (Even if those worker bees are multimillionaires and are reinventing the world economy as we know it.)

This state of affairs is mirrored between Brooklyn and Manhattan. First, there's the chip on Brooklyn's shoulder. A slight majority of Brooklyn residents voted in 1894 to merge with the City of New York, and the wound to the Brooklyn identity was referred to at the time as the "Great Mistake." Mourning the loss of an independent identity is hardly an exaggeration. One need only glance at a map of the New York City subway to see that all roads (with the exception of the G line) lead to Manhattan. How can another borough truly have an independent identity when even the subway reveals the point of the city's story?

Although the epicenter of New York City's economy is undeniably Manhattan, Brooklyn's status as the most populous borough means it supplies the people required to keep the city going. According to the last census, Manhattan's population was 1,620,867, while Brooklyn's figure was 2,465,326. The only other borough with a population comparable to Brooklyn is Queens, with a population of 2,229,379.

Despite Brooklyn's second-city similarities with San Jose, this is where the comparison breaks down. San Jose, I love ya. But Brooklyn in cool in two ways that, well, you're not.

First, Brooklyn in a cultural force in its own right. Starting with Walt Whitman, Brooklyn has served as a home to writers looking for a little perspective, a place apart from the cacophony that sometimes makes Manhattan too frantic. The trend continues. In last summer's New York Times, Arthur Phillips noted in passing that "new zoning laws that require all novelists to live in Brooklyn." Brooklyn has a siren song that the creative cannot resist.

Second, San Francisco yuppies don't grow up and move to San Jose. Conversely, Manhattan yuppies do grow up and move to Brooklyn. Sure, this migration of thirty-somethings to Brooklyn occasionally draws the ire of committed Manhattanites, but the lady doth protesteth too much. Are these frustrated urbanites afraid of losing their youth by proxy when they see their friends head to the outer boroughs?

Steph & I felt the pull of Brooklyn strongly during a trip to a friend's Park Slope home for brunch a few weeks ago. On the way back from brunch, we walked down 5^th Avenue to return to the subway. As we progressed toward Bergen Street, we both got the feeling that – were we to stay in New York – this is where we'd be headed. Turning 30, having a child, and staying on Manhattan means that someday, if you work hard and are lucky, you might have an apartment where TWO (yes, TWO!) people could shower at the same time IN DIFFERENT BATHROOMS. Alternatively, moving to Brooklyn means staying connected to the heart of the city while living in a community that permits you a little more space. To me, the choice would be easy.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Manhattanhenge

As noted in Gothamist and elsewhere, Manhattanhenge occured tonight. Manhattanhenge (or the Manhattan Solstice) occurs twice each year when the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets on the island of Manhattan (which are offset 28.9° from true east-west).

You don't have to wait long for the next Manhattanhenge sunset. It's on July 12.

Manhattanhenge sunset in front of our apartment on 89^th street.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Images are an essential part of the scientific process. More so than words, and even when heavily doctored or taken selectively from dishes of otherwise abnormal samples (I mean, come on, WE know what they should look like), pictures form the foundation of monographs in natural history. Nowhere has this been more true than in marine biology and microbiology, where samples are often delicate and hard to ship to museums inland or, in the case of tiny things, can only be viewed by professional scientists with expensive microscopes and a lot of training in how to use them.

In the olde days, the obtainment of such images relied on the skills of technicians and researchers able to draw what they saw and transform those drawings into formats that could be printed for distribution in journals. Though cases of manipulation are known, for example Haeckel's drawings of early embryos, these hand-drawn images were remarkably good, and it's taken us decades (or centuries in some cases) to perfect cameras capable of recording what these early researchers saw in their scopes. Curating my image database recently, I came across a few of my old favorites that are worth showing here, both because they are beautiful and because they are an excellent reminder that some skills in science just aren't as common as they used to be.

Leeuwenhoek's first images of cells in slivers of cork bark were among the most transformative images in all of science, and remain among my favorites due both to the impact they had on how we think about biological organization (imagine biology class without cells) and because no matter how many times I've tried to recreate this image in lab, I can't get anything close to this good. My microscope costs $250,000. He made his microscope by hand.


Other favorites of mine, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, come from Mortensen's monographs on sea urchin larvae. Whenever I find a larvae I can't identify, or a feature that seems odd, I can almost without fail find out what I need to from his papers from the early 1900s. This one is his drawing of a several-week-old larvae from the sea urchin Tripneustes esculentus. I wish I could remember the website I finked this from. My apologies to you, webmeister, where ever you are.

And perhaps my favorite of all of the images from scientific days of yore are Haeckel's beautiful drawings of jellyfish, beautiful creatures and the inspiration for one of the best art-meets-science exhibits I have ever seen at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This particular copy of Haeckle's image comes from Florian Raible at EMBL.

If you've been a reader of this blog for a while, you will no doubt have been impressed by the volume of lawyerly knowledge contributed by the other authors. I have no such knowledge. But I do have pretty pictures and proof, I hope, that there are indeed beautiful things in the intersticies of life.


A gaggle of larvae from the urchin Lytechinus variegatus viewed under polarized light to make the skeletons glow. No other manipulation of the image was performed.


A three day old pluteus larvae from Sphaerechinus granularis.


And a freaky-weird (but pretty) hybrid larvae resulting from crossing Sphaerechinus granularis and Paracentrotus lividus. Hopefully that's still legal to do by the time this goes live.

Whenever I find things tedious, frustrating, or just dump in my work, I look at these images and remember that tiny living things are really cool.

What I'll Miss About New York: #19 — (Certain) New York Weather

Let's be clear: There are many aspects of New York weather I will most certainly NOT miss.

New York weather means a sweltering hot summer, with heat reflecting off concrete surfaces below you and around you as you sweat your way to the subway. New York weather also means a winter that – while not as cruel some other Northern cities – makes for some rough going. Since most everyone in New York gets about mostly on foot, you experience a New York winter in a more personal way than you would in a more car-based location.

There are two aspects of New York weather that I'll miss.

First, there is some fine weather in this city. May (and late April) and September (and early October) in New York City can mean some truly beautiful days. A room-temperature city and clear skies translates into lots of smiles on the street. Plus, New York has cold yet clear winter days that I didn't realize I missed living in Northern California (where the winter means months and months of perpetual cloud cover). Somehow that blue sky looks all the more blue when framed by the buildings lining Broadway.

Second, there's the way that New Yorkers react to good weather. Having lived in California, I have seen how a whole region can grow to take good weather for granted. I grew up in Nebraska, a place with wildly fluctuating weather, in a household that watched The Weather Channel as if we were all going to be tested on the information later. Compare that with my time in California, where checking the weather meant looking at the calendar. Is it May? If so, it's not going to rain on your barbeque – no forecast necessary.

I'm reminded of how much New York City residents appreciate their good weather every April. This year it was April 17 when the year's first beautiful 72° day arrived. Columbia's Low Library has an impressive set of steps in front of it, and as was the case with the two previous years, undergraduate sun seekers occupied every possible inch of space on these steps, happy to soak in the sun that they had missed so desperately during a long winter and a wet spring.

What's this? After living in New York City for three years, I'm returning to California. These are the parts of my New York experience that I'll miss the most.

Putting Obama's Portland Rally in Perspective

According to MSNBC, Obama's rally in Oregon yesterday attended by 75,000 supporters was not the largest US political rally ever. That honor goes an 80,000 person rally held by Kerry/Edwards back in the 2004 campaign.

The big difference? The Kerry/Edwards rally was one week before the general election. Yesterday's Obama rally was 169 days before the general election.

It's not going out on a limb to say that Democratic rallies this year are only going to get bigger — a LOT bigger.