I had assumed by the title this would be about automatic tire pressure monitoring/adjustment in cars and trucks. I don't know much about it, but in the truck space, products claim ~1.5% better MPG and longer tire life. It's also used to deflate tires when in muddy conditions like construction sites to keep from getting stuck.
I like how Sherp does this. Tires have 2 automatic valves - you can set the pressure and it will fill the tires with exhaust fumes if it's too low and release them to atmosphere if it's too high.
Very interesting but also so disgusting for the spirit of sport.
Here you have the confirmation that it is not the best human performance that wins in the end, but the one that has more money to spend in R&D and product development for the bicycles or tools.
That’s needlessly reductive, treating the engineers as if they were machines that convert money into performance. But engineers are human too and this is a challenge for them. They do need money, but it’s not a given that the most money gets the best engineers.
It does change the nature of the challenge when it’s not entirely about the individual on the bike.
Sports that depend on some mechanical variable seem to trend toward improving/tuning that variable in whatever ways allowed by that sport (car/bike/boat racing).
We get the same complaint in ML - big companies have more money for compute so they can try more idea variations, discard the bad ones and stake a claim on the good ones. Or even on the same architecture they can train more models and by pure chance get one that is %0.1 better than previous SOTA ("random seed optimization").
There are sports that are almost only about the human, sports that are almost only about the machine, and everything in between. Cycling is in between and always has been, people have looked for an edge since the beginning. It is part of the fun for some, a chore for others.
Cycling is a mechanical sport, mechanical sports are a competition that test both the machine and the people who design and build it as well as the human operating it.
There are competitions where everyone is given the same machine to put emphasis on the human performance. In cycling for instance, Japanese "Keirin" racers all use the same low tech steel bike that they maintain themselves.
Anyways, money is always going to matter. More money gives you better training, better nutrition and medical support, better equipment and can allow athletes to focus exclusively on their sport by offloading them from the usual chores. In teams sports, also better teammates. There is no way around it, but it doesn't mean the athletes lose merit, even with performance enhancing drugs, it takes a lot of effort and dedication to come out on top.
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Here you have the confirmation that it is not the best human performance that wins in the end, but the one that has more money to spend in R&D and product development for the bicycles or tools.
Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn0lqMuGguw
10% of X might sound a lot until you realize that X only accounts for 2.2% of the total.
It does change the nature of the challenge when it’s not entirely about the individual on the bike.
Swimming -> buoyant suits; Basketball -> Lighter, stiffer shoes; Soccer -> Cleats, Uniforms; Running -> Carbon fiber plates;
Sports that depend on some mechanical variable seem to trend toward improving/tuning that variable in whatever ways allowed by that sport (car/bike/boat racing).
There are competitions where everyone is given the same machine to put emphasis on the human performance. In cycling for instance, Japanese "Keirin" racers all use the same low tech steel bike that they maintain themselves.
Anyways, money is always going to matter. More money gives you better training, better nutrition and medical support, better equipment and can allow athletes to focus exclusively on their sport by offloading them from the usual chores. In teams sports, also better teammates. There is no way around it, but it doesn't mean the athletes lose merit, even with performance enhancing drugs, it takes a lot of effort and dedication to come out on top.
discussing Natural or Not Natural (Tour de France, but he'll call out anybody).
> last year we ran 32mm tires labelled as 30mm
That sounds dodgy, but maybe I'm missing some context.
for competition purposes, there may be maximum widths (depending on the exact rules, more like 33-38mm), not based on the label but measured directly