
The 'Broomgate' Controversy Rocking the Sport of Curling - lando2319
http://gizmodo.com/heres-the-physics-behind-the-broomgate-controversy-rock-1781822352
======
squidlogic
The article doesn't seem to go into the actual physics too much. It instead
links to a blog post [0] and another article [1] that go into more detail. I
recommend reading these over the gizmodo one.

[0] [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-
physics/p...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-
physics/physicists-on-ice-exploring-the-physics-of-curling/)

[1] [http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/physics-of-
curlin...](http://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/physics-of-curling.html)

~~~
dang
Not sure if we should change the URL to the first article you've linked to;
it's by the same author, but from 2014, and perhaps there's new information in
the current post. Perhaps we'll just take "physics" out of the title above.

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userbinator
_There’s a strong belief in the sport that it’s the players throwing the
stones, not the sweepers, who should have the strongest influence on
individual shots._

My first thought upon reading that sentence was, "Isn't it a team sport?"

~~~
lj3
The argument is it fundamentally changes the nature of the sport. Imagine if
somebody came up with a baseball with a magnet in it that was attracted to the
catcher's glove. The catcher now has most of the control as to where the ball
goes and all the pitcher is doing is applying speed to the ball. Would that be
a natural advancement of the sport? Or would it be cheating?

That's the question the curling world is asking right now. And to make the
whole thing murkier, they're able to make this fundamental change not by
adding technical wizardry, but by subtly altering something that is already
part of the game. Exploiting a flaw in the game, as it were.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Imagine if somebody came up with a baseball with a magnet in it that was
> attracted to the catcher's glove. The catcher now has most of the control as
> to where the ball goes and all the pitcher is doing is applying speed to the
> ball. Would that be a natural advancement of the sport? Or would it be
> cheating?

Imagine if somebody invented a hollow aluminum baseball bat that could hit the
ball much farther than a wooden bat could.

~~~
lj3
Precisely why the MLB banned the use of aluminum bats.

~~~
thaumasiotes
How did they "fundamentally change the nature of the sport"? As I understood
things, aluminum bats were banned as an effort to make sure professional
baseball records from the past stayed comparable to records from the present.
They're not, of course, since early athletes didn't use steroids, but we're
stuck with the wooden bats anyway.

~~~
GunboatDiplomat
Wooden bats sound better, though. The a satisfying crack that's missing with
aluminum bats.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Wow, that wasn't something I expected to see stated in wikipedia, but there it
is (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat)
):

> Aesthetically, wooden bats are generally preferred to metal, both for their
> traditional appearance and satisfying traditional "crack", far superior to
> alloy bats' hollow "ping".

That seems to fall a bit short of "neutral point of view".

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dijit
Very off-topic and in regards to the title alone:

Could we stop using -gate to mean scandal? it has very little context outside
of watergate which was actually the full name of the hotel, and was also
called "the watergate scandal" not simply "watergate"

Is there a real reason for it? or is it just unfashionable to use the word
"scandal"?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix)

~~~
evincarofautumn
A surprising number of words arise from a process called “misdivision”. In
this case, “-gate” was coopted as a generic suffix for scandals, in the same
way that “-burger” is a generic suffix for certain types of hot sandwich, even
though the name comes from Hamburg+er, not ham+burger.

Off the top of my head: “a napkin” used to be “an apkin”, “a lute” used to be
“al ’ud” (“the lute”, in Arabic); “an orange” used to be “a norange”, and
moreover, the colour is named after the fruit—we used to call the colour
“yellowred” (geoluread, in Old English).

Language evolves in messy and illogical ways.

~~~
_acme
From Wikipedia:

Note that juncture loss may have occurred in a different language before a
word reached English; for example, orange did not develop in English from *a
norange, but rather the juncture loss occurred in Old French and Anglo-Norman
orenge, or possibly in Italian.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Ah, thank you. I had my history mixed up. Still a decent example, though—and
curiously it didn’t happen with Spanish _naranja_.

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kwhitefoot
Surely the solution is either to have a more restrictive formula for the
equipment or to make the players use each others equipment at random so that
bringing a better broom might give the advantage to your opponent.

~~~
mrob
Randomizing the equipment is a bad idea. If you're confident that you would
lose an even contest, then it's a good idea to bring the worst broom
allowable. You might get lucky and have your opponent use it, putting them at
a disadvantage. If they don't then you lose, but you were going to lose
anyway. Randomization always favors the weaker party.

