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valyrfia · 1 month

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The Sainz Effect on Media: What the Hell is Going On?

Last weekend, Carlos Sainz Jr. won the 2024 Australian GP, and subsequently, almost every single F1 media outlet has seemingly lost their minds. From the aramco power rankings giving him a perfect score (despite Max not getting one for a grand slam last weekend), to motorsport.com acting like a fan account, everyone is tripping over themselves to sing his praises.

F1 is a complex sport, it requires several different aspects to even get a car moving, even more to make it competitive, and even more to enable a championship fight. From driver line-up, to aero, from international politics, to tyre deg. There's no other sport like it. To truly be an expert in Formula 1, you have to have knowledge of how a track works, an understanding of combustion engines and aerodynamics, a grasp of interpersonal and sports psychologies, and a sense of international relations. This is why, even more so than any other sport, good journalism is vital to the sport's ecosystem. No one person can be expected to be an expert in all these areas, you need a team of people who are willing to pool their knowledge and resources before coming up with conclusions to disseminate to their audience.

But media also likes narrative, and media likes an underdog, that is undeniable. And you can create an excellent underdog narrative with Carlos. From losing his seat despite his teammate keeping his, to him having to get his appendix out in Jeddah, the circumstances are there to set up an underdog narrative. But the crux of the issue is this: anyone with any sort of F1 wheel knowledge understands why Charles was kept over Carlos (a better driver even in a car built away from his driving style, who is revered almost as a messiah figure amongst the traditional fans of the team), why Sir Lewis Hamilton is a much more desirable asset to a top team than Carlos (7x world champion, who brings in a massive draw for talent that will far outlast his stint with Ferrari). So what do you do with these characters who don't match the narrative that you want to push?

Simple. You discredit them.

Make no mistake, this is what we're seeing across every major F1 news outlet in the past week. A plain journalistic choice to choose narrative over integrity. There's all sorts of rumours whizzing around as to why that could be: from possible covert payouts from Sainz Sr, to possible misogyny towards Leclerc fans to pundits simply not being bothered to do their research. But the why of it, although important, doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that however you look at it, these journalists are failing the sport they claim to love. What's even worse, is that it takes a simple glance at numbers to tell us that these media outlets are digging themselves a hole, and are going to have to backtrack or try and excuse their belief in this narrative in the coming months.

Let's take a common line that Sky Sports like to use as an example, "Carlos Sainz is driving for himself. How incredible would it be if Carlos could compete for the championship this year." Max Verstappen will likely win the championship this year, there are no ifs and buts about it. Red Bull are still developmentally leaps ahead of their rivals, and even if Ferrari were to catch them, Max is still at the wheel. And if Ferrari were to catch them, why would Ferrari prioritise Carlos over Charles? The only driver who has been proven to be able to beat Max in his current form at Red Bull on pure pace is Charles Leclerc, which he achieved in Las Vegas last year, and would've gone on to take the win at that same race if not for the safety car. The most likely championship fight this year is Max Verstappen vs. Charles Leclerc, and that's hinging on Ferrari matching Red Bull development. This outcome is blindingly obvious to anyone who knows how this sport works, and yet the current media angle seems to not be to explain how the sport works to the general public, but rather to double down on narratives that are certainly going to be proven incorrect in a manner of months, if not weeks.

Let's look at another common angle the media seem to like to take, "You have to ask, did Ferrari make a mistake swapping out Carlos Sainz for Lewis Hamilton?". Now, if you've been even near a TV showing F1 in the past ten years, it's pretty obvious this answer is of course not. Lewis Hamilton is likely the greatest driver of all time, his name in a lot of cases outshines the sport itself. No other driver on this grid even comes close to his level of acclaim. This reason alone is enough for Ferrari to sign him. Ferrari has not won a championship in close to two decades, the best and brightest engineers want to be working where they know the results are going to come from, and right now, as a stellar engineer, Red Bull or Mercedes or even McLaren would be a choice over Ferrari, which has the added hurdle of moving to Maranello (considering nearly all the other teams are located in the Midlands in the United Kingdom). Acclaim aside, Lewis Hamilton is still a very impressive driver. P3 in the championship last year to a Red Bull 1-2 is not something to be taken lightly, considering his teammate finished in P8 in the same car with only one more retirement. It does make pure racing sense to sign him over Carlos, who finished in P7, especially since Ferrari have an up and coming talent in Ollie Bearman, and what they need is someone with experience to fill that gap until Ollie can make it to Ferrari, and will likely happily step aside when that time comes at some point in the next five years.

However, has there been a single major F1 news outlet calmly and rationally explaining this thought process for those who may enjoy the sport but are not experts? No. Instead, what we get is Sainz sensationalism, and bias so explicit it tips right over into unprofessional. From The Race saying that a Sainz/Leclerc civil war is Leclerc fan hysteria, despite their own outlet running an article just months ago about tensions in Ferrari, to motorsport.com creating a CV for Carlos, and then proceeding to harass fans who ask why they are so keen to ignore facts. Every single F1 outlet seems to have lost their minds.

The sad thing is this will only backfire massively on Carlos himself. Charles will outperform Carlos, every metric from the past year indicates so. Ferrari may be in the running for the WCC by the midpoint of the season, but Carlos's win will fade into distant memory long before we reach Spa, and the average enjoyer will look back on all this crazy media hype and go "hm, well he didn't live up to expectations did he? He was massively overrated." And this too, will be the fault of F1 media.

In conclusion, F1 media sensationalism has failed Charles, Lewis, and Max, it will fail Carlos in the coming months, but most of all, it has failed the fans of the sport, by choosing to focus on far-fetched narratives, rather than deliver proper journalism and build equally compelling narratives out of the data on the table. It highlights a lack of skill and awareness, which threatens the entire ecosystem of the sport that we all know and love.

#f1 essays #charles leclerc #lewis hamilton #f1 journalism discourse #formula 1

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krakenartificer · 6 years

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theaussielemming asked “Hi! You replied to a post about mathematics and teaching it to...”

OK, I don't know how well I'll be able to explain in text, but I'll do the best I can!

The first thing that it's worth saying is that mathematical "truths" are a different sort of truth from even, like, scientific truths. Math is true because we've literally all just agreed that we're going to call this thing by this name. When you've defined all the rules of the conversation, then it's no surprise that the conversation goes the way you say it will. When you get right down to it, you would be amazed to how much of mathematics boils down to things that are the equivalent of "I declare a thing with three sides to be a 'triangle'" and then a little while later saying "I have determined that all triangles have three sides!"

Mathematicians are people who enjoy doing things like that. We like making rules, and then doing things that...like... stretch the rules? In weird ways? And seeing what happens. Because we like turning our brains inside-out.

Now we'll tell you that math has many applications, and it does -- like we'll totally be like "Chaos theory is important in aerodynamic modeling!" "Differential equations can model quantum physics!" "Non-Euclidian geometry helps us model the universe!" and it's true... but that's not why we do it. We do it because we have a strange idea of what constitutes fun. There's a reason most of the words we use amongst ourselves to describe our hobby are synonyms for masturbation.

Honestly it's just kind of some strange cosmic coincidence that the weird shit we dream up to give ourselves non-chemically-induced trips just, like, happen to be useful irl. All of which is a very long way of saying that negative numbers are a thing that happened when a couple of mathematicians got drunk in Renaissance Italy*, and the conversation went something like this:

Mathematician 1: Dude. OK, OK, so you start from 10 and you count down, right? And you get to 2, 1, 0. What you just, like ... kept going?? Mathematician 2: Woah. You could like, you would go out the other side. Like, you'd have 1, 2, 3, but, on, like, the other END. Going the OTHER WAY. Math1: Woah. Math2: Woah. Math 1: OK, so, like, as you count down from 10, you're getting smaller, right? You're getting less stuff? And then you get down to where you've got nothing. And then you keep going, and you come out the other side, and you've got LESS THAN NOTHING. And you just keep going, and you keep getting just, like, less and less than nothing. Math2: Don't be stupid. You can't have less than nothing. Math1: Sure you can Math2: Yeah? Like what? Math1: Uh.... Math2: No, seriously. Give me one sensible example of what it would look like if you had less than nothing. Math1: I'll think of something. Gimme a minute! Math2: There’s no way! I'll bet you a Lira** you can't come up with a single example! Math1: You're on! Gimme another beer while I think about it.

*several beers later*

Math1: Yeah man. I got nothing. You're right. Math2: I told you. Pay up. Math1: *pats pockets* Man, I don't have my coin purse. I'm gonna have to owe you. Math2: K

*the length of one ironic pause later*

Math1: Heywaitaminnit! I got less than nothing! Math2: What? No you don't. Math1: Yeah I do. I got no Lira on me. But I still owe you a Lira. If someone gave me a Lira, then I would have to give it to you, and that would cancel my debt, and I would have nothing. So if you added one to the number of Lira I have, I would have 0. That means that right now, I have less than 0 Lira. Math2: Shit. You're right. Math1: Which means I don’t owe you anything, because I came up with an example. Math2: Hey wait, that's not what we agreed! Math1: Surely you agree that we defined the terms of the bet to be...

*fade to black*

OK, so that's how we've defined negative numbers: they're just like positive numbers, but going the other way. If we're talking about things like Lira or bottlecaps or sheep, then the easiest way to think of it is as a debt. But you could also just think of it like a line. You move one foot right -- that's positive one. You move 2 feet right -- that's positive two. If you move one foot right and then two feet right, then you will have moved a total of three feet to the right, which means that 1+2=3. (Yay math!!)

In that case, negative numbers are moving the other way. Move one foot left -- that's negative one. Now you're back at being two feet to the right of where you started. So it turns out that 3+(-1)=2. Which is kinda funny cuz 3-1=2 also. SO, suppose we define adding a negative to be the same as subtracting?

That fits. It means that moving left is the same whether you think of yourself as doing subtraction or you think of yourself as undoing addition or you think of yourself as adding negatives. It also means that if I add your assets to your debts, I will come up with the amount of money you'll have after you pay off your loans. It works. So we kept doing it.

Now here's where the mathematicians get weird. What if you subtract a negative?

Well, subtraction means turn around, right? If we're moving right to add, then we move left to subtract.

And negative numbers means turn around, right? If we're moving right to add positive numbers, then we move left to add negative numbers.

They both mean turn around; go the opposite direction. So if I turn around for the subtraction, and I turn around for the negative, then I'm back to facing the same direction I started. I turned around and turned around again, and now I'm heading off to the right again. So subtracting a negative is the same as adding. (We said. To ourselves. In our masturbatory discussion that makes mathematicians so irritating to normal humans.)

But it works. It's a self-consistent system that can be used to describe a large range of useful real-world things. If you define up to be positive and down to be negative, then you can define gravity as a negative acceleration, and a lot of physics is a lot easier. It makes it easier to keep track of your assets vs your liabilities in [x] brainteasers (and also in actual accounting).

SO. You can keep your expenses as a positive number, and then you subtract them from the budget. That's perfectly valid -- that's the same as 3-2=1

Or you can count your expenses as negative, which makes total sense and is totally what negative numbers are for. But in that case you don't need to subtract it from the budget; the negative is already built into the fact that you kept the expenses as negative numbers. So you take your budget and add to it the negative amount of money you have as a result of your expenditures, and you get the amount of money you have left. That’s the same as 3+(-2)=1

But if you subtract the negative expenses, then you've turned yourself around twice, and now you're heading in the wrong direction, and you're going to end up with a higher number than you started with.

***

I have NO idea if that was helpful, or just really really long. At any rate I hope it was at least moderately interesting or entertaining. And if it was none of that, well I still appreciate the opportunity to lecture, so thank you for your question! Footnotes: * nb -- this history is going to be INCREDIBLY Eurocentric, for which I apologize, but it's the only history of maths that I was taught and I'm typing this off the top of my head. If anyone wants to add on with other cultures' history of negative numbers, I would be most grateful. ** I have no idea what currency Italy was using at the time Appendix 1: TL/DR: This guy (source)

Took away your debt. Debt is a negative, and he took it away. So he subtracted a negative. As a result of this, you have more money than you started with. So he has added to your net wealth. Therefore, subtracting a negative = adding

#math #maths #mathematics #long post #VERY long post #explanation #or maybe not #who knows

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mst3kproject · 7 years

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K19: Hangar 18

If the History Channel were to make a movie, Hangar 18 would be it.

We open in space, on a shot of the same 1/100 scale space shuttle model kit I built as a kid, except theirs has a better paint job. You can tell it's sci-fi because the credits are in a public domain approximation of the 80s NASA font. During the mission, a satellite collides with a UFO – the satellite is destroyed, the astronaut who was working on it is apparently decapitated, and the UFO itself makes an emergency landing in Arizona.

From here, two things happen. The surviving astronauts are somewhat upset when the ensuing coverup blames them for the death of their colleague, so they set out to find some proof of what really happened while the government tries to keep them in the dark. Meanwhile, scientists attempt to study the UFO, and learn that Erich Von Däniken was right about absolutely everything and aliens invented MP3s long ago. Eventually, the people in charge of the conspiracy decide that this is going to ruin everybody's careers if it gets out, and crash an RC plane into the hangar where the saucer is being kept.

Robert Vaughn is in this. His ears are still distractingly small.

Before I say anything else, permit me a small Space Nerd moment. Nobody involved in this movie had any idea how things are done in space. You can't just throw on a space suit as if it's a light fall jacket. It takes at least fifteen minutes to get into the multiple layers of padding and cooling systems and then you gotta double-check all your seams because you really, really, really don't want anything to leak in fucking space. Spacewalking astronauts also have to pre-breathe, which gets extra nitrogen out of their blood so they won't get the bends. The shuttle's three main engines were only used on ascent and the shuttle itself had a minimum crew of four. The lack of detail on their shuttle sets and spacesuit costumes is utterly laughable, as is the tiny mission control room that looks to have maybe twelve people in it.

Some of this may be blamed on the fact that Hangar 18 was released in 1980, while the real-life space shuttle didn't begin test flights until 1981. Thing is, the production actually thanks NASA in the end credits, which suggests that they spent some time there and had plenty of opportunities to ask questions like, “what would this look like?” and “how long would it take to do that?” So either they didn't bother to ask, didn't bother to use what they'd learned, or just didn't care – and as a result the beginning of their movie looks like something out of Mighty Jack.

All right, with that out of the way, what is this movie supposed to be? Well, as I said above, it's the History Channel. Hangar 18 is basically a distillation of the entire modern UFO mythology (yep, here I go again), complete with Men in Black, abductions, Area 51, ancient astronauts, and crash retrievals – all in a ninety-six minute nutshell! The only thing it's missing is a cattle mutilation. The problem is that none of these things really make any sense when you think about them with your tinfoil hat off, and the movie doesn't try very hard to make sense of them.

First, there's the whole 'government cover up' angle. In the movie, the bigwigs don't want anybody finding out about the UFO at first because they fear it will affect the outcome of an impending election. In the interests of keeping things quiet they move the craft to a secure facility and pay off the witness who saw it land so he won't talk to anybody – sure, that works. But there are also the two astronauts who watched this object kill their colleague. You would assume that they would be interviewed and then told about the need to stay mum for a while... but this never happens. In fact, for reasons that are absolutely not remotely 'reasonable', the conspiracy just ignores the astronauts entirely until they start making pests of themselves.

When a news story breaks blaming the two astronauts for the death of their colleage, the higher-ups don't even comment on it. When the astronauts themselves start asking questions, they are shut out, followed, and harrassed, until one of them and at least four of the federal agents are dead. Why was any of that necessary? One guy did suggest, right at the beginning, that it would be easier to just write them a cheque and ask them to take a vacation while this all got sorted out, but apparently trying to assassinate two celebrities in public was much more acceptable.

At the end, the conspiracy realizes that the saucer itself has become a liability. If anyone finds out about the stupid decisions they've already made, their careers will be over, so it's time to do one more mind-numbingly idiotic thing and blow the whole thing up. Oh yes, clearly, destroying the scientific find of the millennium and killing everybody who knows about it is the obvious solution. That will definitely make all their problems go away.

Naturally it does not, but we never really see the consequences of this. A voiceover tells us, as the credits roll, that the people who were inside the ship survived the blast and the fire. The secret is now out, but we never get a hint of the fallout. At the end of Captain America: the Winter Soldier we saw the evil senator getting arrested and a glimpse of Black Widow testifying, and that's enough to assure us that everything turned out okay. In Hangar 18 we're supposed to take it on faith that the conspiracy guys will be punished, instead of, say, vanishing into 'retirement' on a tropical island somewhere. We're not supposed to be curious about the effect these revelations will have on society, or what will happen when the aliens actually return. Any of these things would be a more interesting movie than watching two guys in bell-bottoms getting chased across the desert by Men in Black.

The UFO itself had quite a bit more effort put into it than anything else in the movie – maybe this is why they had no money left and were forced to settle for that plastic model kit of the space shuttle. In space it is visible only as an arc of orange lights, actually looking rather like the Phoenix Lights of 1997, and is really kind of eerie. Then we get a closer look at it in the hangar, and find it is nothing at all like the standard-issue flying saucer we were expecting. It looks more like a piece of industrial equipment you'd find at an oil refinery, with a strong sense of weight and scarcely a hint of aerodynamics as we know them. The first time it appeared, I honestly wasn't sure what I was looking at – was that supposed to be the UFO? I'm not entirely sure if I like this treatment of it, but it definitely surprised me.

The inside of the craft looks more like we might expect a UFO to look, with silver walls and blinky lights and dead dudes with shaved heads. Much is made of the fact that symbols on board the spaceship are identical to those known from assorted ancient cultures, but the ones we see are all completely made up because that means they didn't have to do any research. The space armadillo in the glass tube is somewhat interesting. The blonde woman who wakes up screaming could have been interesting, but the movie just puts her in an ambulance and forgets about her.

Then there's the aliens. This is the bit where the movie goes full Von Däniken, with a character proclaiming that human evolution has been shaped by these beings from the start. That's why we and they have identical internal organs, right down to the useless bits like the appendix and the nictitating membrane.

Human anatomy is derived from the same primate ancestor as that of the other great apes, which in turn is derived from the last common ancestor of all mammals, which is derived from the last common ancestor of all tetrapods, which is derived from the last common ancestor of all vertebrates, and so on, and so on, and so on. There is nothing in our bodies that other animals don't have in some form, because we all began with the same source material. You can follow this right down to the molecular level: every living thing on Earth uses the same chemistry, because we all have a common origin.

If we're positing that a creature from another planet has the same internal organs as us, it doesn't matter how much they're supposed to have messed with our genes, it's still ridiculous. A true alien would have had to start from scratch. There's no reason why they would even use the same genetic code as us (for example, with three A's in a row coding for lysine, aka the one the Jurassic Park dinosaurs can't make), let alone have an appendix. For these aliens to be responsible for our anatomy looking just like theirs, they would have had to guide the origins of life on Earth from its formation, and kept an eye on it since to make sure it didn't wander off on an evolutionary tangent before inventing bilateral symmetry or something.

Don't even get me started on the idea that aliens could interbreed with us. It'd be like trying to create something that was half-human, half-watermelon, only even more so.

Other than the strange-looking UFO, Hangar 18 doesn't offer us anything particularly memorable. The characters aren't very interesting, the aliens are utterly forgettable movie aliens, and the effects are unconvincing at best. The story avoids the more interesting ideas it brings up and sticks to the obvious. It's mediocre and disappointing, and I can't imagine I'll ever want to watch it again.

#mst3k #reviews #hangar 18 #80s

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