Published March 28, 2002 in issue #0008 of the Hook

By Bill Sones and Rich Sones

Q. What's the toughest thing to do in all of sports?

A. "In terms of physical difficulty, I've heard persuasive arguments that the biathlon-- cross country skiing/shooting-- is the toughest because it requires the body to do two very different and contradictory things at the same time," says Penn State sports historian Mark Dyreson. First, one skis intensely, raising the heart and respiration rates and creating other physiological manifestations of dynamic aerobic exercise. Then one has to quickly quiet the heart and breathing in order to shoot effectively-- no easy feat.

From a historian's viewpoint, the toughest thing to do in all of sports was to be a member of the losing team in a MesoAmerican ball game. This game was played for thousands of years in ancient Mexico and Central America, and spread in various forms into much of North America. The game had deep religious and political significance among the Maya, Aztec, and other MesoAmerican civilizations. It was a brutal and violent game, and injuries were common.

"Captains of losing squads, and sometimes the entire losing team, were sacrificed to the gods-- giving a new meaning to the old cliché that winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."

Q. If you've got time on your hands, figure this: Besides 12 o'clock, how many times each day do a clock's hour, minute, and second hands line up exactly?

A. Noon and midnight are it, though near 3:16:16 and 8:43:43 the three hands look quite close, separated by half a degree, or 1/720th of the clock face circle.

Hour and minute hand line-ups occur in 11 places: 12:00:00, 1:05:27, 2:10:54, etc. Minute and second hands do this at 59 places, spaced about 61.02 seconds apart; hour and second hands at 719 places, about 60.08 seconds apart.

Digital clocks are different, coinciding once per hour due to continuous rounding-offs: at 12:12:12, 1:01:01, etc.

Q. Do storks ever "bring" babies? What about Dr. Stork, obstetrician, who delivers babies?

A. Funny anyone should ask, because nearly everyone can call to mind crazy name coincidences-- like two loud brothers named "Sones" (scientific unit of sound)!

Got your own examples?

Brown University psychologist Lewis P. Lipsitt recounts trying to make the point to a class to beware "illusory correlations"-- two things that seem related but truly aren't (like storks and babies, which in old Dutch villages both increased with more population, babies for obvious reasons and storks because there were then more nestable roofs).

Lipsitt brought up the subject of name coincidences, mentioning people he knew at Brown (all true), like Dr. Hawkes who heads the Audubon Society; Mr. Rowles, head of the local Automobile Association; Prof. Fiddler in the music department; Ms. Record, who kept the alumni records; Dr. Fish, who founded a chapter of the Oceanographic Institute and hired two men named Saila and Seman (all with the marine lab).

He thought he had convinced his class that they should be careful about false attributions of causation, until a student piped up, "You must be right, Professor, because you study sucking behavior in babies and your name is Lipsitt."

"I started to argue that with my name, I could have had several occupations, but by then we were all stuck, myself included, in believing there was something to it. And the end of all this is I now have hundreds of examples, because my students of many years keep sending them to me, even some unmentionables torn from the pages in hotel phone books."

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