I gotta tellya…Ima glad the darned Olympics are over and really can’t understand some of the decisions that various people made…

There was the Australian field hockey player that decided to buy cocaine from an undercover cop.  

There was the whole kerfuffle over the two female boxers who have female external parts (apparently) but have XY (male) chromosomes rather than the normal YY that females have (again, apparently). Both were identified at birth as female, have always identified as female, and one comes from a country where claiming to be a trans sexual person is illegal and would get you jailed or executed. We’ll never know for sure…but both of these women are (again, apparently) some sort of intersex genetic variation rather than being purely female. In reality…it’s probably not fair for them to compete in either men’s or women’s sports as they would have potentially an advantage in one by having more testosterone than pure females are supposed to have…but would have a disadvantage in having less than pure males in the other competitions. I have no idea how that issue could be solved.

However…the most glaringly obvious stupidity appears to be from today’s decision by the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) in regards the bronze medal in the women’s floor routine finals. When the US woman finished her routine and her score was announced her coaches filed an appeal that one of her moves was not scored correctly. The on site judges for the competition agreed and added 0.1 to her score which raised her from 5th to 3rd and she was awarded the bronze medal. Subsequent to this…the Romanian woman who was originally ranked as 3rd and her coaches appealed to the CAS to have the on site judges ruling overturned and the 0.1 addition removed. Their justification was that the appeal was submitted 64 seconds after her score was posted which is over the 1 minute maximum. The first issue here is the rules for appeal. A gymnast and their coach has until the end of the following gymnast’s routine to appeal a scoring decision…which is normally 4 minutes as that’s how long a routine is required to be. The last gymnast only gets one minute to appeal…so the last one is deliberately treated differently under the rules and that just doesn’t seem fair.

Nonetheless…the Romanian folks appealed the decision of the on site judges but not to the people running the Olympics but rather to the CAS. The CAS appointed a 3 member arbiter panel which examined whatever evidence the Romanians provided, ruled that the appeal was submitted late, and directed the Olympics people to remove the 0.1 addition to the US gymnast’s score…but one of the 3 members of the panel was…you guessed it…a lawyer who is the long term counsel of the Romanian Olympic Committee who brought the case to arbitration. Talk about conflict of interest…geesh. Then the International Olympic Committee revoked the US bronze medal, directed her to return it, and decided to award it to the Romanian.

After that CAS and IOC decision…the US coaches found video that conclusively revealed that the appeal was submitted at 47 seconds and 55 seconds after the score was posted…and while I haven’t seen the video the decision of the CAS today indicates it was conclusive.

With the new video in hand…the US coaches appealed the CAS decision to the CAS…who denied it saying

“USA Gymnastics was notified by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Monday that their rules do not allow for an arbitral award to be reconsidered even when conclusive new evidence is presented,” the organization said in a statement. “We are deeply disappointed by the notification and will continue to pursue every possible avenue and appeal process, including to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, to ensure the just scoring, placement, and medal award for Jordan Chiles.”

In other words…the CAS said that their arbitration was under the rules of the CAS (which they established I guess) an arbitral decision could not be reversed even with conclusive evidence submitted.

Nuts I say…while I have zero interest in whether this young lady gets a bronze medal or the Romanian woman gets it…the function of the rules and judges is to get the decision right. That’s why there’s instant replay and things get overturned. No matter who wins or loses…it should be fairly decided and if the judges made a mistake then the mistake should be reversed.

In this case…the original scoring judges made a mistake and an appeal was submitted. They apparently decided the appeal was in time, reviewed the scoring, and changed the scoring to correct their error. Then the people who were originally wrongly judged to be 3rd place appealed with some evidence…but not to the Olympics people, no, they appealed to an outside organization (CAS) who directed the Olympics to reverse an apparently correctly made scoring change. Then the CAS refused to overturn their wrong decision when presented with conclusive evidence that the arbiter panel decision was wrong.

Connie has little respect for the CAS…they rule frequently in bicycle related matters and at least according to her they frequently do stupid things. Seems to me they’re basically corrupt.

Anyways…on to the remainder of snake and reptile day.

Central American Gulf Coast Toad

Boyd’s Forest Dragon

And another example of needing assistants with this sort of shooting. You can see one of the workshop participants (they rotated this duty) staying out ofd frame while moving his hand on the back side of the dragon to get it to pick up it’s head while others compose their shot.

Blunt Headed Tree Snake. This is the skinniest snake Neil has ever seen…it was about 3 to 4 feet long and the body less than a quarter inch around…the head is the largest part of it. Non venomous, it eats bugs.

More very strange looking eyes.

Flicking its tongue.

Eyelash viper. This is a juvenile about 12 inches long but it was the only one snake guy captured the night before. And again…different eyes.

Overhead flash to give it the nighttime look.

Coral Snake. This is the same as the one in the US but this one is thinner relative to length than the US ones Neil has seen in the past.

With that…Snake and Reptile Day was done…or so they thought so it was off to lunch. Meanwhile…Connie was having lunch and some neon blue cocktail by the pool. Her drink is almost the same color as Cherenkov radiation…here’s a slight aside on that.

You’ve all seen in movies and TV the pulsating glow of nuclear reactors and like most of us you probably realized it was…fake and think that nuclear reactors don’t glow. Turns out…they actually do glow but you never see it because the glow is from something discovered by a Soviet scientist named Pavel Cherenkov, hence the name. The radiation is caused by

is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium (such as distilled water) at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefront in a medium) of light in that medium.[3] A classic example of Cherenkov radiation is the characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor. Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom, the sharp sound heard when faster-than-sound movement occurs. 

You can’t normally see it because it’s inside the pressure vessel for power generating area tors…but most research reactors operate at atmospheric pressure and are of a design referred to as a swimming pool reactor. The fuel is at the bottom of a pool of water which makes an excellent shield for the released radiation and in those reactors you can actually see the glow from the radiation. Here’s a picture of what it actually looks like.

Ok…end of aside so back to her lunch and cocktail.

Neil and the workshop folks went to this eco-lodge owned and operated…again…by some relatives of Dennis and after lunch decided to walk around the ‘nature walk’ at the lodge. On the way through the accommodations which were single person/couple rooms they spotted Snake Day Part 2.

Fer de Lance…most venomous snake in the country and among the worst in the world depending on which internet page one chooses to believe.

Close up. This is a juvenile one about 18 or 20 inches long.

Backing up just a bit…the brown door to the left side of the shot is the entrance to one of the guest accommodation cabanas. There’s a window about 18 inches above the snake covered only by a screen with the bed immediately on the inside of the window. Doesn’t seem a good place to hang out to me.

Out on the nature walk…they found an adult version of the Fer de Lance…this one was about 5 feet long and was easily identified by the sign posted near where it was lying. The second one gives you an indication for the name…fer de lance is Spanish for “head of the lance”…the head is shaped like the lance head used by the conquistadors back in the colonization days.

With that…Snake and Reptile day was done and they headed back to the resort for dinner.

Cyas.