Does Swimming Have A Doping Problem? Probably not.

Maybe like a lot of you, I've been watching the Olympics over the past few days. In particular the cycling road races and the early stages of the swimming competitions. The swimming has really caught my attention. For a sport that requires such physical fitness, why is it almost untarnished by doping scandals? The only scandals I'm aware of are the Chinese in the 90s and Ian Thorpe's alleged use of EPO, and that's nothing when compared to the scandals cycling or athletics have suffered. Is it because swimming is free from doping?

It's unlikely, I don't believe any sport is completely free from doping. If there is an opportunity to cheat, a small percentage of athletes will take that opportunity. In my opinion the percentage of athletes who do dope depends on the environment they're in, for example a cyclist in the mid 90s would be far more likely to dope than a cyclist nowadays. Better testing and the blood passport program is a factor but in my opinion the main catalyst for change in professional cycling has been the environment, the 'Omerta'* no longer exists to the extent it once did.

However I really don't believe swimming has these issues that have plagued other sports, mainly because doping seems to be far less beneficial in swimming than say cycling or athletics. To understand this better we need to look at the average age of world records in swimming and athletics and compare the two (for both we will use the close of the Beijing Olympics).

Firstly swimming: The average age of a men's world record is 1 year, 1 month, the average for women is only 8 months, out of 32 combined events only 4 have records older than 3 years.

Secondly athletics: The average age of a men's world record is 8 years, 11 months (Bolt breaking a 12 year old record played a large part in that), the average for women is far longer at 14 years, 9 months (22 times older than the women's swimming records!).

Swimming doesn't follow the same pattern at all and I've no doubt the swimmers of the 80s and pre EPO test era were doping to a similar extent as the track and field athletes. It just means that doping in swimming doesn't increase performance to anywhere near the extent it does in athletics, largely because swimming is such an inefficient activity. The best swimmers are only about 7% efficient, so a drug that improves strength and power would have a far smaller effect because most of the strength and power gained is lost to the inefficiency of the stroke. Swimming only started to see world records tumble with the introduction of the 'speed suits', better technology in pools and an all round better understanding of how to swim efficiently.

When you're swimming fast improving how efficiently you move through the water would be far more beneficial than doping. This can be clearly seen after the farcical 2009 swimming world championships where almost every world record was destroyed. Soon after, the suits were banned and the sport went almost 2 years without a world record.

I'm not saying that doping doesn't exist in swimming, it just seems that doping is far less prevalent than you would expect of a sport in which world records were broken at will. For a sport that is so dependent on efficiency, it may be more beneficial to improve your stroke than improve your red blood cell count.

However that's not to say some athletes don't do both.........


*Omerta - Term used in cycling to describe the wall of silence surrounding doping, you simply do not discuss doping to an outsider.

How many helium balloons is it safe to buy a child?

Yesterday I was reading a few articles I'd put in my favorites folder over the past few years, one in particular that you might remember was the 'Balloon Boy' hoax. It got me thinking, could you buy enough balloons at say a fair ground to accidentally get a child airborne?

First we need to know that it takes roughly one litre of helium to lift one gram so to lift a child weighting 25kg we would need 25,000 litres of helium, that's quite a lot. If we assume that an average helium filled balloon is 25cm in diameter we can use the equation 4/3 x pi x r x r x r to find the volume.

By taking pi to 2 decimal places and the radius as 12.5cm we get:

4/3 x pi x 12.5 x 12.5 x 12.5 = 8,177.08 cubic centimetres, which is just over 8 litres.

If we assume that the balloon and the string weight 2 grams, each balloon could lift just 6 grams in addition to its own weight. For your child that weights 25kg you'd need 4,167 balloons and roughly £8,500 in cash to lift him or her off the ground, probably not something anyone will do by accident.

Why did Alcatraz close?

Alcatraz was one of the most successful prisons ever built in terms of preventing prisoners from carrying out successful escape attempts. Although the prison itself was at the time one of the most secure facilities in North America it was the icy water of the San Francisco Bay that prevented prisoners from reaching freedom. If the prison was so successful, why was it closed?


During the 29 years Alcatraz was a Federal prison it held claim to an almost 'perfect' record, 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts with two men trying to escape twice. Of those 23 were caught, six were killed from gunfire during their escape attempt, two drowned and five are listed as "missing and presumed drowned". The only reason Alcatraz can't claim a 'perfect' record is because there is a small possibility that the five "missing and presumed drowned" are still alive, although this is unlikely. Alcatraz held many famous prisoners from Al Capone to James Bulger, usually prisoners sent to Alcatraz were ones who presented a serious security risk or who had caused trouble at other prisons. One prisoner held there that I found interesting was Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the Ridley Scott film, American Gangster.


So why if Alcatraz was so secure and a prison capable of holding the most dangerous inmates was it closed? Ironically salt water forced the closure of Alcatraz, the very ingredient that made the prison so secure in the first place.


Alcatraz used salt water to flush the toilets, salt water contains magnesium chloride, sulfate ions and hydrogen carbonate ions that will attack concrete to a certain degree. Although what really starts to corrode in a concrete structure is any of the steel substructure within, the main line of defence in preventing prisoners from tunneling through concrete walls. Usually the steel inside concrete will react with it's interior alkaline environment, this forms a film that protects the steel. However when salt water soaks into concrete the chloride and sulfate ions weaken the film, once the film is breached the corrosion process begins to work on the steel itself.


Over time the concrete walls of Alcatraz became so weak that it was possible to tunnel through them with only a spoon, three prisoners did just this to escape in June 1962. Their bodies were never found and as a result the US Marshall’s office is still investigating the case, a case which will remain open on all three until their 100th birthday's. After that attempt in 1962 it started to become apparent that Alcatraz's walls were no longer secure enough for a Federal penitentiary, that and it was over three times more expensive to operate than the average US prison ($10 a day compared to $3 a day). As a result Alcatraz was closed on March 21st 1963.

It seems ironic that the very thing that made Alcatraz so secure was what ultimately led to it not being secure enough.

Northern Ireland, is it time for water charges?

If you live in the UK you've almost certainly either heard of or been affected by flash flooding over the past 2 days. The infrastructure that's supposed to deal with excess water and avoid the situations seen across the country just hasn't been adequate resulting in widespread calls for better and more efficient drainage systems.  I want to focus on Belfast, Northern Ireland and why it's in a unique situation compared to the rest of the UK. Northern Ireland is unique because it does not pay water charges, is it time for a change?

£135 million pounds, that's the cost to bring Northern Ireland's water and sewage systems up to minimum EU standards. The fact that Northern Ireland needs that size of an investment shows just how poor the existing system is and goes a long way in explaining the scenes over the past number of days, but where will that money come from without introducing water charges?

The simple answer is money would have to be taken away from other projects in the Department for Regional Development's budget or if necessary re-allocate funds from other departments. Saying that it's highly unlikely that money would be taken from other departments, Northern Ireland is financially strained in almost every government department and taking money from schools, hospitals, the emergency services and other areas to prevent flooding is never going to happen meaning money would have to come from the existing DRD budget. 

The DRD has an annual budget of £926m, £342m of which is for water and sewage services. It seems like a lot but remember that the £342m for water and sewage doesn't include the £135m required to improve the existing system. The question is whether Northern Ireland is willing to sacrifice things like better roads and resurfacing programmes to make up the additional money? I've no doubt that anyone with flood damage would say that's a fair trade but in reality it isn't. I don't want to go into a lot of a detail as to why it isn't a fair trade but for example sacrificing better roads would affect everything from the already ailing economy to response times for emergency services, from tourism revenue to unemployment levels, the list goes on. The money has to come from another source, water charges.

As of 2011 Northern Ireland had around 720,000 households, if each was to pay the proposed £400 in water charges the DRD could generate upwards of £250m a year in addition to their existing budget. That would be more than enough to cover a substantial upgrade to the system and more importantly keep it up to date for the foreseeable future.

Gone are the days of direct rule when parliament would throw money at Northern Ireland in an attempt to further the peace process, the money has to come from within. Political parties have used water charges to gain votes, it helped their cause in the short term but ultimately isn't a sustainable position long term. Northern Ireland has a simple choice, introduce water charges or get used to the scenes of the last few days because unless something changes it's going to happen again.    


*Article was written on the 29th of June 2012 following flash floods in Belfast*

What can you count to?

I was talking with my Dad a few nights ago and he mentioned a child in his school and her proclamation that she could count to 100. While worthy of a pat on the back for a 6 year old it's probably not something many adults would list in their skill set. 100 was a massive number to that little girl and the largest number she knew of at that time, but how high can I or any adult for that matter count?

To start I figured ask any adult to count as high as they can in standard dictionary numbers, nine times out of ten they'll answer "Hundred, thousand, million, billion, trillion.....ummm". Most people get stuck at a trillion even though if you know some simple shape names you can work out what comes next in the sequence quite easily. After trillion comes quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion and so on, but even these numbers are unimaginably small compared to some numbers we've actually managed to name. 

Probably the most well know giant number thanks in part to a bit of promotion from Google is a Googolplex although it isn't even the biggest number, that honour falls to Graham's number which is unimaginably larger than a Googolplex. For this post though I'm going to focus on describing just how big a Googolplex is. 

An easy way to comprehend just how big a Googolplex is would be to write it down. Unfortunately that just isn't physically possible, for reasons that I'll explain but before I continue it's important to know that a Googolplex can be expressed by or 10googol, basically a Googol followed by a Googol of zeros.

To begin, say we could physically write a Googolplex, how long would it take? Quite a long time, in fact a good bit longer than your life expectancy. Writing two digits per second it would take about 1.51×10^92 years to write a Googolplex which is about 1.1×10^82 times the age of the universe.

What if we were to print the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, one-point font? That wouldn't work either, it would take about 3.5×10^96 metres to write a googolplex in one-point font. The observable universe is estimated to be 8.80×10^26 meters so the distance required to write the necessary zeroes is 4.0×10^69 times as long as the estimated universe. To look at it another way, an average book of 60 cubic inches can be printed with 5.0×10^5 zeroes, that's 5 characters a word, 10 words a line, 25 lines a page and 400 pages total. The observable universe contains 6.0×10^83 cubic inches. So using that size of a book and stuffing the universe with multiple copies we could only fit 5.3×10^87 zeros, far short of a Googolplex. 

In fact there are only about 2.5×10^89 elementary particles in the observable universe so even if we were to use an elementary particle to represent each digit we'd run out of particles well before reaching a Googolplex.

I thought it might be possible to write a Googolplex down in a format which doesn't take up physical space, a computer hard drive. If we used a single byte to store the digits could it be expressed in a format that could theoretically be viewed? Theoretically, yes we could eventually have a hard drive big enough to store a Googol of zeros but we aren't even close to making one this century. For example, in 2009 the estimated size of the internet was put at 500 exabytes (I'm not going to explain how big an exabyte is but all you need to know is it's very very big). If we used each byte contained in those exabytes to represent a part of a Googolplex we'd only have 5.0x10^20 zeros, nowhere near the 10^100 zeros needed.

To answer my original question, how high can I or any other person count? 

It isn't a question of intelligence or even knowing the names of numbers, it's actually a question of how long you can stay alive. If we take a hypothetical man that lives to a ripe old age of 91 and assume that he began counting when he was 5, averaged 2 seconds a number (big numbers take a long time to speak) and continued until he was 90 he'd only have reached 1,340,280,000. So if you ever meet a 91 year old man that claims he has counted to 1,340,280,000 he's either wasted his entire life or he's a liar. He's probably a liar.....