I really like watching PRCA bull riding in addition to PBR bull riding. The PRCA is the older of the two and arguably the most cowboyed-up and least spectacled-up of the two. You don't see flaming bull heads at PRCA events, but is that a matter of philosophy or can the PRCA just not afford them??
I'm confusing myself and straying from my point. The PRCA experiments with something they call "X-Power", which apparently amounts to an accelerometer attached to the flank strap which measures instantaneous spin rate ("angular velocity" to those of us who fancy ourselves to be edumacated) and transmits it to the studio, where they show us all sorts of fancy colored wedges whizzing back and forth until Don Gay suddenly blurts "Fourteen gees! That'll blow snot in your shorts!"
Surely it will.
But I think it's a somewhat inaccurate measurement, and I wish to discuss now what would be a better measurement. Most of this discussion is borrowed (inappropriately at that) from particle physics, so let's start with that. In particle physics, when it comes to measuring certain things, physics like to use rulers. No, I misspoke myself; they like to use two quantities, a state vector and a Hamiltonian. Don't ask me why it's called a Hamiltonian. My personal theory is that the guy who coined the jargon had the hots for Linda Hamilton.
A state vector describes what state the measured entity is in right now. My personal state vector, translated from mathematics, would be something like "I'm sitting in a chair exhibiting bad posture with my hands poised over a black keyboard, and I'm not wearing any shoes." The state vector describes our current circumstances, though obviously it can get pretty complicated. The Hamiltonian describes how the state vector evolves in time. My Hamiltonian would be something like "He's fixing to type the word 'rejoinder' for no apparent reason, and he's starting to feel the effects of two cups of coffee and will shortly have to get up." The state vector describes our current situation; the Hamiltonian describes what we're going to do next, roughly.
Now, back to bull riding. The X-Power thing measures one quantity, spin rate, and turns that into an X-Power number. But we note that that number is expressed in terms of gees, which is a measure of acceleration, which is a measure of the rate of change of speed, which is - holy cow! - the Hamiltonian! The X-Power number doesn't tell us anything about the bull's current state, only the rate at which it spins.
But we all know that a bull ride involves more than just spinning, and as often as not the bull sets a cowboy up for failure. How many times have we seen bulls rare as a prelude to jerking a cowboy down over the horns, or belly-roll to get the cowboy's hips out in space before turning back the other way? One of the most impressive I ever saw was a bull that would move forward at a pretty good clip, the sort of thing that makes Justin McKee blurt "Oh hell, it's just running around!" before it suddenly dug in its front hooves and ducked to the left, causing the cowboy to spear into the ground so hard the bull fighters had to dig him out with a shovel.
Quantifying this requires far more information that just the rate of change of angular velocity. So I posit that to do X-Power properly, one needs to measure the following quantities:
X-bar: the bull's movement forward or back, and its direction Z-bar: the bull's up and down movement, if any Alpha: The bull's angle of attack, or amount of rare Beta: The bull's angle of sideslip W: The bull's angular velocity Jerk: Impact loading produced by the bull's kicks B: The bull's belly roll angle Fc: Apparent centrifugal acceleration, since we can't measure spin radius
We need to know the absolute values, as well as their rates of change.
Knowing all this, we can construct (in theory, anyway) a state vector that precisely expresses the bull's movements at any given instant. This one vector is the sum of every movement and twist the spin. Using the rates of change, we can in principle construct a Hamiltonian that tells us how the state vector will evolve over time.
If we could measure and calculate these things - the state vector and the Hamiltonian - we wouldn't need judges at all. We'd just collect a lot of data, poke it into our simulation of bull riding phase space, wait a little while, and ooh and ahh at the results (which, hopefully, would not be "Your application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down").
The math of all of this is beyond me, but in the meantime, I'm perfectly happy to sit and listen to Don Gay.
-- Edited by Kapitan Mors at 10:46, 2008-09-19 Edited to increase font size and to remove inadvertent use of the word "Oldsmobile"
hee! I really needed to laugh today and many of your comments (including your "edited" one) did the trick. However, I'm exhausted, so I really have no idea if this is a joke or a real thing. If it's not, then I wish they could find a way to measure the bulls because I'd love to see the some readings.
**Of course, after I posted this, I get the idea that it may be william and sure enough, it is. I wish I could be as witty as you and your wife, SQ and her husband.....
