Going to a farm
Tomorrow night? I’m going to a FARM! Lol, hell yea. Every fall, my friend Kelly invites a handful of her friends to the farm where she grew up, in Walnut, IL (yes, there is a city in Illinois named after a type of nut). I missed Kelly’s farm party last year, but I was totally there in ‘03 and ‘04. Should be some fun times.
I was watching the US Open last weekend at my girl’s place in Connecticut with my parents. (Did you get that? At my girlfriend’s house in Cconnecticut with my parents?) and they implemented a new technology to allow players to challenge line-judge calls on whether a ball was in or out. Here’s how the USTA summed up the technology in a ‘new enhancements’ press release sent out a week or two before the US Open:
“*‘Instant Replay’ Electronic Line Calling*: The most highly anticipated innovation at this year’s US Open—instant replay technology with player challenges—will be available in Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium. This breakthrough for the sport has been developed to improve officiating while increasing the interest and excitement for in-stadium fans and television viewers.”
| An article about the technology on C | net credits a British company hawkeye, but I wasn’t able to get a huge amount of detail on how the technology was implemented. It seems that Hawkeye had their own cameras set up in places throughout the stadium, and based on what the cameras see they can estimate up to a 2-3mm accuracy where the ball probably hit the ground. When talking about minute details in estimating an accuracy of 2mm, what sort of assumptions are they making when calculating where the ball hit? While watching a match, when they use the instant-replay technology, it’s a computer generated graphic of where the ball hit, not an actual photo of the ball hitting the ground. The mark of the ball is an oblong circle, proly to accommodate for the ball stretching when travelling at a high speed, but is the stretched circle a standard mark? Or do they use different amounts of stretching a regular circle based on how fast the ball was actually going? I wonder how many cameras they actually have set up in the stadium, and where they are, and what exactly they’re looking at. That would be a sweet tour to take! |