What's the power of a good luck charm?

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Texas Rangers pitcher C.J. Wilson wore a necklace by Phiten that some believe give athletes an edge.Texas Rangers face St. Louis Cardinals in World Series Game 6, postponed to Thursday eveningThere is psychological value to an item worn consistently, one sports psychologist saysSome well-known superstitous athletes include Michael Jordan, Wade Boggs and Turk WendellManufacturer's claims of special technology in metal-infused jewelry are unproved

(CNN) -- As Texas Rangers pitcher C.J. Wilson took to the mound Monday night, he wore a rope-like necklace that may be nothing more than a fashion choice, but if he believes in the maker's claims, that may give him an "edge" against his opponents at bat.

It's not just Wilson; a surprising number of professional athletes have begun wearing the titanium-laced necklaces, including Rangers Derrick Holland, Mitch Moreland and Elvis Andrus.

The "edge" the necklaces' manufacturer, Phiten, claims to give is not proved, but especially for athletes, there is psychological value to an item worn consistently, rituals and superstitions, one sports psychologist says.

"For athletes, there's this unpredictability in sports. They never know how they're going to play, how the other team is going to play, so when you do something that's superstitious, like wearing a trinket, it gives you a greater sense of control," said Gregg Steinberg, an author of "Full Throttle" and professor of human performance at Austin Peay State University.

Some athletes' rituals have been well documented: Pitcher Turk Wendell wore a necklace made from the teeth of hunted animals.

Michael Jordan famously wore his college shorts under his NBA uniforms; third baseman Wade Boggs had to eat chicken before games and wrote the Hebrew symbol "chai," meaning life, in the dirt before batting.

The extra sense of control from the ritual leads to calmness, and calm leads to better performance, explains Steinberg. Whether there are any tangible, special properties in the lucky charm is just beside the point for a sports psychologist.

Fourteen-year-old baseball player Derek Halford of Baltimore says he got his own Phiten necklace when he was 11, after watching the pros wear them.

"Last season, I forgot to wear it to a game, and I called my mom to go get it, because I refused to play without it," Halford said.

This season, he says, he views the necklace differently, but only slightly.

"I probably would still play, but my mind would be all messed up. I probably wouldn't play as well. I probably wouldn't be focused on the game, because I'd be thinking about not having it on."

His first necklace was the plain kind -- selling for $36 -- but now he has upgraded to the newer, larger twisted-rope "Tornado," which costs $50.

Halford adds this self-observation: "I got it for the purpose of making me a better athlete, but now I use it just as a lucky charm."

Bill Burgos, an NBA strength and conditioning coordinator, says that he doesn't intervene when high-performers find value in lucky charms. "When guys have a certain way of doing things, you don't want to mess with that."

The Japanese manufacturer says its products, which include bracelets worn by some pro golfers, do have a special technology that sets them apart.

By fusing fabric with "a novel form of technology that involves metals broken down into microscopic particles dispersed in water" -- metals like titanium and gold -- Phiten is "able to realize customers' potentials in a variety of extents that leads to restore normal status of customers," says the company's website.

Claims like that -- and paid endorsements from 23 professional athletes in the United States alone -- seem to be enough to convince many athletes that it's better to be safe than sorry. Better to be mistaken than without.

"Phiten has used a pseudoscientific appeal in marketing their products. They talk about 'micro-sized titanium spheres' and other things that give the product the air of technology without any real science to back it up," explains professor Stuart Vyse of Connecticut College, author of "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition."

The Lavidge Co., which represents Phiten U.S.A., could not provide any published studies finding a medical benefit from wearing its metal-infused necklaces and bracelets.

"Baseball players and others who engage in superstitious behaviors understanding that they have no scientific support are likely to say 'I just don't want to take a chance,' " Vyse said." And they get an emotional benefit from doing something that makes them feel like they have greater control. Even when that feeling is an illusion."

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What's A Smoot?

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Oliver Smoot was born in August 1940, making him 18 years old in October 1958, not 17, as a previous version of this post stated; his son, Steve, graduated from MIT in 1990, not 1989. In addition, a previous version of this post quoted Warwick Cairns stating that Oliver Smoot was 48 in 1987; in fact, he was 47.

Have I missed something? What's a "smoot?"

Check out this Google Earth map, which allows me to measure the distance between two points using miles or meters or feet or yards, the choice is mine. Google has a list of options, but notice the ninth one from the top, right below "nautical miles" — have you ever heard of a "smoot?"

Go to a Google calculator, there it is again: You can translate meters, miles or what-have-you into 'smoots.' So a smoot is a Something — but what kind of something? A quick web search led me to a short essay by British journalist Warwick Cairns which says, intriguingly:

[A] smoot is the height of a man — and not a man in the sense of men generally, or an average man, but a man, in the sense of Oliver R. Smoot, the five foot seven inch Chairman of the American National Standards Institute and President of the International Organization for Standardization.

Hmmm. This is getting interesting ...

The Origin Of The Smoot

Several internet sources say that back in October, 1958, Oliver R. Smoot was a first year student at MIT, trying to join a fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha. During "pledge week," wannabe frat boys were asked to do semi-insane things to demonstrate their willingness to be humiliated by upper classmen, a test of character for certain fraternities.

 

In Oliver's case, the assignment was to go with a bunch of other pledges to a bridge — the Harvard Bridge that spans the Charles River — and measure its length, but not in the usual way, says Mr. Cairns:

[T]hey were told to use one of their number as a 'ruler.' Smoot was chosen for the job because he was the shortest — which would make the task longer and more arduous — and because he had the silliest name, which was already [thought of as sounding a bit like] an obscure unit of some sort anyway.

The measurement was done by getting Smoot to lie down, marking his height with chalk and paint, then getting him to stand up, move one length further along and get down again, and again, and again. For a while, Smoot did it under his own steam but after a hundred or so times he became tired and his companions ended up simply dragging him from one space to the next.

In this way, it was determined that the bridge was 364.4 smooots long "plus epsilon," although this was later recorded as 364.4 smoots plus an ear.

And so the "smoot" was born. A smoot is the length of one 18 year old Oliver R. Smoot — which translates to five feet seven inches, exactly. Which means, if you want to measure things in smoot-lengths, using the Google calculator (with help from my partner on this blog, the artist/animator/arithmetician Benjamin Arthur), an adult Apatosaurus from head to tail in smoot units, would work out to ...

By contrast, a flea would be a fraction of a fraction of a smoot. Something like....

It has taken a half century for the Smoot to become a smoot. For some reason the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department did not erase the 364 painted marks on the Harvard Bridge back in 1958. The next year, Lambda Chi pledges repainted the same marks, and again, the police and the Highway Department looked the other way. Revandalizing the bridge became an annual practice until 1987. That was a watershed year, says Warwick Cairns:

In 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works decided that the bridge needed renovations and resurfacing, and this meant removing all the smoot markings. This caused something of a commotion locally, and the press contacted Oliver Smoot, who [was] executive Vice President of the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association in Washington DC, to ask whether he would be prepared to be re-used for new markings, should the need arise. He was less than sure that he would.

Meantime the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission (the folks in charge of the bridge) went on record in support of smoots.

"We recognize the smoots' role in local history. That's not to mean that the agency encourages graffiti painting. But smoots aren't just any kind of graffiti. They're smoots!"

[And so...] the Continental Construction Company of Cambridge paved the bridge with slabs that were five foot seven inches long (smoot length) instead of the usual six foot increments. Annual smoot painting continues to this day.

Everyone at MIT knows about smoots. When they graduate, it appears they slip smoots into new places. I don't know this, but I'm guessing that Google has a cluster of MIT moles who've introduced the smoot to Google Earth. It's only a matter of time before the rest of us start matter-of-factly smooting. I can imagine the "forestry" smoot.

Or a farmer at the state fair proudly advertising his prize chicken's high smoot count ...

There have been a couple of attempts to "modernize" the smoot by retrofitting it to match more recent Smoots, Steve (Oliver's son), MIT class of '90, and Sherry (Oliver's daughter) MIT '99, but purists quickly put an end to that. As for Oliver, he lives on — though many MIT-ers assume that like Watt, Celsius, Curie, and Mach, he's dead. He isn't. In fact, he recently retired from the board of the American National Standards Institute, a group that helps set standards in industries across America. Mr. Smoot doesn't have to do that anymore. He is a standard.

Benjamin Arthur is a regular contributor to this blog. Together, we've made videos about why people keep walking in circles, and how billions of invisible insects fly over our heads on clear, warm days; he's drawn hobbit people being chased by giant storks, chemists dissolving golden Nobel prize medals, and multiple portraits of a 17th century mouse who wrote poems about cruelty to animals. If you'd like to hear a conversation with Oliver Smoot, he was on All Things Considered a few years back when he retired from his American National Standards Institute job. And special thanks to Ashwin Seshagiri for alerting me to my first smoot.

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What's A Smoot?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Oliver Smoot was born in August 1940, making him 18 years old in October 1958, not 17, as a previous version of this post stated; his son, Steve, graduated from MIT in 1990, not 1989. In addition, a previous version of this post quoted Warwick Cairns stating that Oliver Smoot was 48 in 1987; in fact, he was 47.

Have I missed something? What's a "smoot?"

Check out this Google Earth map, which allows me to measure the distance between two points using miles or meters or feet or yards, the choice is mine. Google has a list of options, but notice the ninth one from the top, right below "nautical miles" — have you ever heard of a "smoot?"

Go to a Google calculator, there it is again: You can translate meters, miles or what-have-you into 'smoots.' So a smoot is a Something — but what kind of something? A quick web search led me to a short essay by British journalist Warwick Cairns which says, intriguingly:

[A] smoot is the height of a man — and not a man in the sense of men generally, or an average man, but a man, in the sense of Oliver R. Smoot, the five foot seven inch Chairman of the American National Standards Institute and President of the International Organization for Standardization.

Hmmm. This is getting interesting ...

The Origin Of The Smoot

Several internet sources say that back in October, 1958, Oliver R. Smoot was a first year student at MIT, trying to join a fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha. During "pledge week," wannabe frat boys were asked to do semi-insane things to demonstrate their willingness to be humiliated by upper classmen, a test of character for certain fraternities.

 

In Oliver's case, the assignment was to go with a bunch of other pledges to a bridge — the Harvard Bridge that spans the Charles River — and measure its length, but not in the usual way, says Mr. Cairns:

[T]hey were told to use one of their number as a 'ruler.' Smoot was chosen for the job because he was the shortest — which would make the task longer and more arduous — and because he had the silliest name, which was already [thought of as sounding a bit like] an obscure unit of some sort anyway.

The measurement was done by getting Smoot to lie down, marking his height with chalk and paint, then getting him to stand up, move one length further along and get down again, and again, and again. For a while, Smoot did it under his own steam but after a hundred or so times he became tired and his companions ended up simply dragging him from one space to the next.

In this way, it was determined that the bridge was 364.4 smooots long "plus epsilon," although this was later recorded as 364.4 smoots plus an ear.

And so the "smoot" was born. A smoot is the length of one 18 year old Oliver R. Smoot — which translates to five feet seven inches, exactly. Which means, if you want to measure things in smoot-lengths, using the Google calculator (with help from my partner on this blog, the artist/animator/arithmetician Benjamin Arthur), an adult Apatosaurus from head to tail in smoot units, would work out to ...

By contrast, a flea would be a fraction of a fraction of a smoot. Something like....

It has taken a half century for the Smoot to become a smoot. For some reason the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department did not erase the 364 painted marks on the Harvard Bridge back in 1958. The next year, Lambda Chi pledges repainted the same marks, and again, the police and the Highway Department looked the other way. Revandalizing the bridge became an annual practice until 1987. That was a watershed year, says Warwick Cairns:

In 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works decided that the bridge needed renovations and resurfacing, and this meant removing all the smoot markings. This caused something of a commotion locally, and the press contacted Oliver Smoot, who [was] executive Vice President of the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association in Washington DC, to ask whether he would be prepared to be re-used for new markings, should the need arise. He was less than sure that he would.

Meantime the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission (the folks in charge of the bridge) went on record in support of smoots.

"We recognize the smoots' role in local history. That's not to mean that the agency encourages graffiti painting. But smoots aren't just any kind of graffiti. They're smoots!"

[And so...] the Continental Construction Company of Cambridge paved the bridge with slabs that were five foot seven inches long (smoot length) instead of the usual six foot increments. Annual smoot painting continues to this day.

Everyone at MIT knows about smoots. When they graduate, it appears they slip smoots into new places. I don't know this, but I'm guessing that Google has a cluster of MIT moles who've introduced the smoot to Google Earth. It's only a matter of time before the rest of us start matter-of-factly smooting. I can imagine the "forestry" smoot.

Or a farmer at the state fair proudly advertising his prize chicken's high smoot count ...

There have been a couple of attempts to "modernize" the smoot by retrofitting it to match more recent Smoots, Steve (Oliver's son), MIT class of '90, and Sherry (Oliver's daughter) MIT '99, but purists quickly put an end to that. As for Oliver, he lives on — though many MIT-ers assume that like Watt, Celsius, Curie, and Mach, he's dead. He isn't. In fact, he recently retired from the board of the American National Standards Institute, a group that helps set standards in industries across America. Mr. Smoot doesn't have to do that anymore. He is a standard.

Benjamin Arthur is a regular contributor to this blog. Together, we've made videos about why people keep walking in circles, and how billions of invisible insects fly over our heads on clear, warm days; he's drawn hobbit people being chased by giant storks, chemists dissolving golden Nobel prize medals, and multiple portraits of a 17th century mouse who wrote poems about cruelty to animals. If you'd like to hear a conversation with Oliver Smoot, he was on All Things Considered a few years back when he retired from his American National Standards Institute job. And special thanks to Ashwin Seshagiri for alerting me to my first smoot.

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What's behind the backlash against transgender people?

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Story on transgender children generates heated commentsHostility toward transgender people comes from challenging gender conventionsDiscomfort for transgender also stems from religious views

(CNN) -- Tuesday's CNN.com story about transgender children and their families shed light on an emotional topic and provoked strong response.

"Transgender kids: Painful quest to be who they are" centered on identity, gender, health, parenting and child development. It's not unusual for a popular story on CNN.com to have hundreds or thousands of responses, but the overwhelmingly negative tone of Tuesday's comments raised the question about the root of the hostility. What exactly provoked such harsh opinions?

The discomfort toward transgender people comes from challenging conventions, said one academic who focuses on social attitudes and behavior.

In American culture, sex and gender belong in one of two categories, said Diane Everett, professor of sociology at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. As soon as humans are born, the first thing people ask is whether the baby is a boy or girl.

"We tend as a society to put people into boxes," she said. "Someone who is transgender is not only crossing gender boundaries, but also defying them. If people can't relate to you as an either-or, they have a hard time relating to you in their general comfort level."

Then there are people who for religious reasons believe transgender is fundamentally wrong, that "God created man and woman. Automatically, man is male, woman is female, and they shouldn't cross these lines."

The issues usually end up in a debate about which bathroom transgender people use, Everett said. It's a symbol of the entire controversy because it has to do with gender, sexuality and comfort level.

The discomfort stems from the view that a person is either female or male -- and in rare cases, intersex. Changing what you're born with is "basically self-mutilation," said Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, a group that works with people who no longer practice gay, lesbian or transgender lifestyles. "You're talking about surgery to alter who you really are from a biological standpoint."

People with gender identity disorder deserve proper medical and psychiatric help, she said.

Not conforming to gender is not a disorder, says group

Griggs said she has heard from parents who have transgender staff in their children's schools and that "they're being told that it's normal, natural and healthy, (that they) have to respect them and approve."

"Why are we hiring people who are cross dressing? Why should children be told that's acceptable behavior? That's where the line is being drawn. We're telling people it's natural, healthy, normal behavior and it's still classified as a mental illness."

Gender identity disorder is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the "bible" of psychiatry.

Transgender people challenge the ideas ingrained in society about gender and sex, said Mara Kiesling, founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. People are taught that boys stay as boys, girls as girls, and that boys will marry girls.

"All of those things are true for most people," she said. "It's true that most people are either male or female and it is immutable for most people. Most boys act like stereotypical boys, most girls act like girls. What we're learning now is none of those things are immutable as we were taught. It's striking at some naïve orthodoxy that people have been taught by society since our childhood."

Transgender people face minority stress, meaning that they're made to feel unwelcome or an odd minority, Kiesling said. They also face stigma, sometimes from their own family, job discrimination and bullying.

"Why in the world would anybody be so hostile about parents really trying to understand something about their children that wasn't in the original playbook as parents?" she said. "They're doing the best they can trying to do right by their kids."

The hostility can come at surprising times.

A transgender woman, Amber Yust, who changed her name from David, went to her local Department of Motor Vehicles in San Francisco to update her license last year. She received a letter from one of their employees accusing Yust of acting in a way that is "an abomination that leads to hell." That employee was identified and subsequently resigned.

Chaz Bono, born a girl to entertainers Sonny and Cher and now publicly transitioning to life as a man, has been the most recent transgender person to be the focus of news reports. When it was announced that Bono would compete on "Dancing with the Stars," conservative family groups protested and started an online campaign against the popular reality show.

A Foxnews.com contributor chimed in suggesting that parents not allow their children to watch Bono on TV, because it could inappropriately influence children.

"The last thing vulnerable children and adolescents need, as they wrestle with the normal process of establishing their identities, is to watch a captive crowd in a studio audience applaud on cue for someone whose search for an identity culminated with the removal of her breasts, the injection of steroids. ..." wrote Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.

His post got 33,000 Facebook recommends and more than 2,000 Tweets.

But not everyone on the network agreed. His views were challenged by Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, who questioned his evidence.

View the original article here

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