It has 16 goose feathers, sits on a stump of Portuguese cork and flies at up to 300 miles per hour, which makes the badminton shuttlecock one of the more curious pieces of sports equipment to be found anywhere.
And there's this: Shuttlecocks, or shuttles for short, weigh only a few grams but must be durable enough to keep their shape even after players whack them as hard as they can.
In backyards around the world, badminton players often hit heavier, plastic shuttles that are designed to endure the constant abuse of amateurs. Professional shuttles, on the other hand, are made with demanding craftsmanship, and those are the ones that end up at the Olympics.
Yonex, which provides most of the badminton equipment being used at the Rio Games, shipped nearly 15,000 F-90 shuttles to Brazil from its factory outside Tokyo. Fans in the stands and viewers watching on television have no way of telling, but Yonex included four grades of shuttles, from slow to fast, that are deployed based on the conditions at the badminton venue, a boxy convention space with ceilings almost 40 feet high.
The shuttles vary in weight ever so slightly, and counterintuitively, the lighter shuttles fly slower because they wobble more. Which is where the science comes in.
Shuttles are chosen to align with the temperature and humidity at a competition. When the air is dense, the shuttles fly slower. In those cases, tournament officials choose a faster, or heavier, shuttle to compensate. By contrast, when the air is less dense, competition officials pick a slower, lighter shuttle.
To figure out which shuttle to use each day in Rio, a tournament referee and a representative from Yonex go to center court before the first match. On a recent morning, as a sprinkling of athletes and fans filed in to the building, Boris Reichel, who works for Yonex, took three No. 2 shuttles and three No. 3 shuttles and went to the service line.
He hit them with a gentle arc to the singles service line on the other side. The shuttles landed a few inches short. He then went to the other side and hit them back again. This time, they all landed closer to the line. Reichel figured that the shuttles had flown farther in that direction because of a draft coming from the doors that were opening on that side of the building.
The tournament referee was comfortable with that variable and determined that the faster No. 3 shuttles would be used that day.
"It's important to make sure the players are playing under the best conditions because otherwise they wouldn't focus on the game, but on the shuttles," said Ronny De Vos, the deputy badminton referee at the Olympics.
De Vos, a cheerful Belgian who has worked his way up the badminton ranks over the past 25 years, said that while all the shuttles looked alike, an expert player could tell the difference by hitting them. Still, other than a number affixed to the tubes that hold a dozen shuttles at a time, there is nothing to indicate whether a shuttle is slower or faster.
The tubes are kept at what is widely referred to as shuttle control, which is little more than a table by the side of the court where a volunteer watches over the shuttles, stored in a cardboard box.
Elite players can tell if shuttles have even slight imperfections because they are harder to control. Like a pitcher who motions to the umpire for a new baseball, a badminton player can ask for a fresh shuttle and get one, although only with the consent of the umpire and the opponent.
At the Olympics, about two dozen shuttles are used in each match on average. About 90 percent of the time, Reichel said, there is nothing wrong with the shuttle, and players are asking to get a new one to gather themselves physically or mentally, or to break their opponent's rhythm.
The shuttles themselves are intricate creations. Yonex orders thousands of goose feathers a year from China. The feathers are then trimmed to size and matched by color, flexibility and other factors. Only feathers from the left wings of geese are used in the tournament shuttles. Satoshi Yuza, a promotion manager at Yonex, chalked that up to aerodynamics.
"The contours and curvature of the left feathers allow the shuttle to spin and fly more consistently," he said. "Lower-grade shuttles are made with other feathers from a goose or even duck feathers, and then formed to match a left-winged feather."
Yonex takes all of this quite seriously. The company orders specially made cork from Portugal for use in making the cone of the shuttle. (Denser cork makes for a heavier, or faster, shuttle.) Once the 16 feathers are trimmed, they are stuck by hand into the cork. The feathers are laced together by a machine. The cork is then sealed with a durable white covering.
Here's the special sauce: Yonex employs two or three experts at its factory in Japan who watch the shuttles fly out of a machine and then sort the shuttles by speed.
Yuza was asked if there were a lot of geese flying around China with no feathers on their left wings.
"The Chinese eat goose, so nothing is wasted," he said.
We Take Care of Our Own
By: David Brooks, NYTimes.com
A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen came out with a song called "We Take Care of Our Own." The chorus's theme seemed upbeat and proud: We take care of the people closest to us. But like in a lot of Springsteen songs (including "Born in the U.S.A."), the lyrics in the verses sit in tension with the lyrics in the chorus.
In the verses, it's clear that taking care of our own also means not taking care of people who are not our own, like the victims of Katrina. Suddenly the phrase "We Take Care of Our Own" has an exclusivist, menacing and even racist tinge.
That phrase and the two different meanings it can have sit at the center of election 2016.
Donald Trump's supporters stand for the first meaning. America's first loyalty is to its own workers, its own culture, its own citizens.
This worldview is not just selfishness. For most of human history most people have prized coherent communities above all. They've built moral systems on loyalty and support for their own kin and fellow citizens. These bonds are not based on some abstract social contract. They are intimate bonds, born out of shared kinship, history, geography and common understandings of right and wrong.
People committed to coherent communities will fight to defend the norms that hold communities together. They accept immigrants who assimilate to existing culture, but they'll be suspicious of those who they feel bring in incompatible customs and tear at the social fabric.
For eons, this was more or less the traditional moral system for most of the human race. But as the N.Y.U. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in anoutstanding essayin The American Interest, over the past several decades a different mind-set has emerged.
People with this mind-set value the emancipated individual above the cohesive community. They value, or at least try to value, self-expression, social freedom and diversity. Their morality is not based on loyalty to people close to them; it's based on a universal equality for all humans everywhere.
People with this mind-set disdain the political or religious walls that divide people. In his essay, Haidt cites John Lennon's song "Imagine" as an expression of this worldview:
People with this mind-set bridle at the exclusivist implications of the line "We Take Care of Our Own." It's fine to value Americans, but we should also take in the immigrant and be multilateral in our foreign relations.
Haidt argues that the division between these two camps is a division between the nationalists and the globalists. It's also between the moral particularists and the moral universalists, between those who believe that blood and historic ties take precedence and those who, like the philosopher Peter Singer, argue that you have the same moral obligation to a boy starving to death in South Sudan as to a boy drowning in the lake in front of you.
For decades the globalist/universalist mind-set - pro-immigration, pro-globalization - has been on the march. Now, with Trump, the particularists are striking back. Immigration is the subject that fuels their ire.
As Haidt writes, "By the summer of 2015 [when the Syrian refugee crisis hit] the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting 'enough is enough, close the tap,' when the globalists proclaimed, 'let us open the floodgates, it's the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.' Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage?"
The fact is that both mind-sets have their virtues. The particularists emphasize the intimate love and loyalty that is the stuff of real community. The universalists are moved by injustices anywhere, and morally repulsed by inaction and indifference in the face of that suffering.
The tragedy of this election is that America already solved this problem. Unlike France and China, we were founded as a universalist nation. You can be fiercely patriotic and relatively open because America was founded to take in people from around the globe and unite them around something new.
Unfortunately, the forces of multiculturalism destroyed that commitment to cultural union. That has led to Trump, who has upended universalistic American nationalism and replaced it with European blood and soil nationalism in a stars and stripes disguise.
The way out of this debate is not to go nationalist or globalist. It's to return to American nationalism - espoused by people like Walt Whitman - which combines an inclusive definition of who is Our Own with a fervent commitment to Take Care of them.
Ben-Gurion on Israel, Peace and Back Pain: A Lost Interview Is Brought to Life
ByISABEL KERSHNER
NYTimes.com
KIBBUTZ SDE BOKER, Israel - The rare, intimate and reflective interview with
Israel'sfounding prime minister was filmed nearly 50 years ago, but it never aired.
David Ben-Gurion, at 82 and five years out of office, spoke in the six-hour interview of state-building and the biblical prophets that guided him; the security imperative of his young nation andIsrael's quest for spiritual and moral superiority; his battle with lower back pain and his interest in Buddhism.
It was April 1968, and "The Old Man," as Ben-Gurion was nicknamed for much of his life, had been largely abandoned by his own political protégés. Paula, his rather brusque and devoted wife, had died that January, leaving him in near isolation in his chosen retirement home inSde Boker, a remote communal village in theNegev desert.
"The most important thing which I learned, I learned by living here," he said. "I want to live in a place when I know that my friends, and myself, we did it. Everything. It's our creation."
He sat for two hours a day, over three consecutive days, and spoke in English. He wore a turtleneck sweater, his casual uniform for cooler days. When the interviewer said he was ready to wrap up the final session, Ben-Gurion protested that they still had 10 minutes to go.
But the reels of silent footage and the soundtrack languished for decades in separate archives. Excerpts from the recently rediscovered conversation form the core of a new documentary, "Ben-Gurion, Epilogue," in which the Zionist luminary offers a raw, contemplative self-analysis of his life's work.
Asked if he feared for his country, he replied, "Oh, I always feared. I always. Not just now." Though it was 20 years after Israel's founding, he said that he feared "the state does not yet exist. It's a beginning only."
Interwoven with other footage from the period - of meetings with foreign leaders, a speech in Israel's Parliament, birthday celebrations - the film is, in part, a wistful ode to a lost generation of leaders who viewed simplicity as a virtue even as they strove for giant goals.
"There is an absence of leadership with those values and that vision," saidYariv Mozer, the Israeli writer, director and producer of the movie, which premiered last month at theJerusalem Film Festival. The film, and therecent bookby Avi Shilon on which it is based, Mr. Mozer added, "reflect the interest of some young Israelis to turn back to our history, to our past, in order to find answers for today and maybe for the future."
Ben-Gurion's matter-of-fact voice from the grave resonates hauntingly, with its mix of pragmatism and philosophical prescriptions bordering on the prophetic. He described the prophetJeremiahas one of the greatest because, he said, "I have the feeling that what he was saying is true."
"He understood politics more than the kings," Ben-Gurion said. "But he was unpopular."
Mr. Mozer and Mr. Shilon pointed to the former prime minister's pronouncements at the time that in return for a true peace, he would give up the territories that Israel conquered in the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, except for the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron. He saw no contradiction in believing that Israel had the right to all the land, but could also concede some of it.
"He thought that the most important thing was to live in the Middle East in peace with our neighbors," Mr. Shilon said. "He said that Israel can win a lot of wars and the Arabs can lose a lot of wars, but that Israel would not be able to stand one defeat; that one lost war would be the end of Israel." Mr. Shilon added, "The problem with Ben-Gurion was that people stopped listening to him."
Mr. Mozer andYael Perlov, the editor and co-producer of the documentary, uncovered the lost interview almost by chance, in theSteven Spielberg Jewish Film Archivein Jerusalem. There, while working to restore an old and unsuccessful feature film about Ben-Gurion by Ms. Perlov's late father, David Perlov, they tripped across the silent film reels. It took six months to find the soundtrack, which they did in theBen-Gurion Archivesin the Negev.
The interview had actually been conducted as background research for the Perlov film. The former prime minister had chosen the interviewer, Clinton Bailey, who was then a recent immigrant from the United States. Mr. Bailey had been befriended by the Ben-Gurions after Paula invited him in for tea one day when he was wandering near their home in Tel Aviv.
Ben-Gurion helped Mr. Bailey secure a teaching job at the academy he had established at Sde Boker, and Mr. Bailey would sometimes join the aging politician on his brisk walks around the kibbutz.
Mr. Bailey went on to become an eminent scholar of Bedouin culture - and mostly forgot about the 1968 interview. Recalling the period, Mr. Bailey said the simplicity of the Ben-Gurions' cabin at Sde Boker was "a statement," adding: " I don't think Ben-Gurion wanted the perks of power."
At Ben-Gurion's request, the cabin has been preserved and is open to the public. A trickle of Israeli families on school break and foreign tourists passed through on a recent sunbaked weekday.
The man who helped create the modern state of Israel insisted, in his sunset years, on being treated like any other member of the Sde Boker collective and ate lunch in the cramped communal dining room.
"In our kibbutz I told them my name is David," he said in the interview with Mr. Bailey. "Not Ben-Gurion. So every morning I came to see what David has to do, and I went to do the work. This is what our prophets said, to serve as an example to other people."
(Kibbutz residents who were there at the time said they gave him the easier jobs, like tending to the lambs and measuring precipitation.)
Archival footage shows Ben-Gurion dedicating the arrival in Sde Boker of the "radiotelephone," which he called a "dubious blessing." In another clip, Moshe Feldenkrais, the mind-body clinician, described how he persuaded Ben-Gurion to perform a circuslike physical feat to bring him more in tune with his body, which resulted in Ben-Gurion's famouslyphotographedheadstands.
Ben-Gurion died in 1973, and was buried in a simple grave next to Paula's on the edge of a stunning desert canyon. His will stipulated no eulogies or gun salute. The tombstone is inscribed only with his name and the dates of his birth, death and immigration to the country.
Settling the Negev, in his mind, was imperative for the young state's future. It was also a place where he could champion his ideals.
"We wanted to create a new life, not the life that exists," he said of the Zionist pioneers. "I believed that we had a right to this country. Not taking away from others, but recreating it."
He had made tough choices along the way, like refusing to allow the return ofPalestinianrefugees from the 1948 war over Israel's creation, and placing Israel's Arab citizens under military rule.
Ben-Gurion believed the state's mission was to fulfill the biblical concept of an "am segulah," an exemplary nation of higher virtues, treasured by God. Asked in 1968 if Israel was carrying out that mission, he replied: "Not yet."
WEATHER IN THE FIVE TOWNS
Tonight
Clear, with a low around 62. North wind 7 to 15 mph.
Tuesday
Sunny, with a high near 81. North wind 5 to 8 mph becoming west in the afternoon.
Tuesday Night
Clear, with a low around 68. South wind 6 to 8 mph.
Wednesday
Sunny, with a high near 83. West wind 5 to 11 mph becoming south in the afternoon.
Forthcoming AARP Defensive Driving Sessions with Prof. Asher J. Matathias
*Wednesday, September 14, all day, 9:30am-3:30pm, Peninsula Public Library, 280 Central Avenue, Lawrence, NY 11559 516-239-3262
**Thursdays, October 6 & 13, 6:30pm, Peninsula Public Library, 280 Central Avenue, Lawrence, NY 11559 516-239-3262
***Wednesday, November 16, all day, 9:30am-3:30pm, Peninsula Public Library, 280 Central Avenue, Lawrence, NY 11559 516-239-3262
*Tuesday,December 6, all day, 9:30am-3:30pm, Peninsula Public Library, 280 Central Avenue, Lawrence, NY 11559 516-239-3262
Our dear Gloria (Pomerantz), In the course of setting up for this month's Defensive Driving class, I learned of your decision to conclude a 50 year stellar career as our Peninsula Public Library's exceptional public face to our community in the post of outreach coordinator! My reaction was mixed, of course: astonishment to amass your remarkable record of accomplishment, while not begrudging your deserved retirement, in your chosen time, which will permit you more time with Bernie and the extended family. For me, you shall be missed as the understanding, encouraging voice of my endeavors in our broader community
The Five Towns Community is known as one of the most active when it comes to Chessed and acts of kindness. There numerous Help Hotlines and G'machs for whatever ones needs may be. To view the entire list of Hotlines and G'machs, please visit:
