Praising the Mentally Ill

Here are the Olympic headlines:

2020 Tokyo Olympics: Why Simone Biles withdrawing from team final is most courageous move she's ever landed

Simone Biles is a role model for prioritizing her own mental health over an Olympic medal

Biles is freaky to look at. She is Black, and 4 ft 8 in tall. Here she is scared of a bee.

I guess no one wants to criticize her, but praising her for choking with a mental health crisis? Weird. She is also praised for being a Larry Nassar accuser. Maybe she is being pitied, I am not sure.

NPR Radio reports:

Japan's Naomi Osaka is out of the Tokyo Olympics after losing on Tuesday in straight sets to Marketa Vondrousova of the Czech Republic in the third round.

The loss is a major upset and a shock to the host country. Osaka is considered the face of these Games and lit the cauldron during the Olympic opening ceremony a few days ago.

Why was she the face of the Games? Was it because she is half-Black, half-Japanese?

To learn about how wokeness is ruining medical schools, I have to read a lesbian writing for a Jewish site:

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.” ...

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

I guess the lesson here is that if we just teach medical students that men can get pregnant, then they might not misdiagnose the above pregnant man.

Update: The American press had billed Biles as the greatest gymnast of all time, but it turns out that she was not even the best on the American team. She was going to lose, if she had continued, and withdrawing allowed her to avoid the defeat.

Tom Watson saves golf

I think that Tom Watson deliberately muffed that last putt on the 18th hole. If he had sunk that putt, then he would have won the British Open at age 59, and it would forever be difficult for anyone to seriously claim that golf is a sport. How could it be a real sport when an over-the-hill 59-year-old could win a big championship?

Thanks, Tom. You are a hero to golfers everywhere. You proved that you could compete with the best of them, but you were too much of a gentleman to humiliate the whole golfing world. The rest of us can still pretend that golf is a sport.

Why are there so few female chess grandmasters?

Cancer researcher Ed Yong writes:

Bilalic smelled a rat in Irwing's contention that men dominate the higher echelons of chess because of their innate ability. In an elegant new study, he has shown that the performance gap between male and female chess players is caused by nothing more than simple statistics.

Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It's a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group. ...

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you'd see that difference close substantially. ...

So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

It is that simple? Wow, I wonder why no one else thought of that.

If it were that simple, then the same analysis could be applied to other games. Some games, like the word game Scrabble, are more popular among women than men.

Here is some other goofy research that was applied to other data to give nonsensical results. Some well-publicized research a few months ago declared obesity to be like a contagious disease; you get fat because your friends get fat. This blog debunks the study:

Recognizing the implausibility of the social networking theory of obesity — as well as social networking increasingly being used to explain other implausibly related physical traits and conditions — Jason M. Fletcher, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, along with Boston economist, Ethan Cohen-Cole, Ph.D., designed an ingenious study. They selected conditions that no one would seriously believe were spread by social networking and online friendships: height, headaches and acne. They then applied the same standard statistical methods used in Christakis and Fowler’s social networking research to “find” that acne, height and headaches have the same “social network effect.”

Yes, of course. You get fat because you eat too much, not because your friends get fat.

Ambiguous Sudoku

Today's San Jose Mercury News (print edition) has an ambiguous Sudoku:

2-8--3--9
----8-4-5
-6------7
--12-----
-9-4-1---
-----98--
9------4-
5-2-4-1--
6--3--9-2

The solution can have 5 or 7 in each of the entries in Rows 1 and 6, Columns 4 and 5.

Real Sudokus are supposed to have unique solutions. Sometimes the uniqueness is useful in finding a solution.

Update: As a comment below shows, I was wrong about this. The solution is unique as it is supposed to be.