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Merlin’s Owl: A Charge to Graduates

“It is at leaving the college and entering the world that the education of youth begins…

It is less uniform than that of childhood but more dependent on chance, and doubtless more important.

The youth is then attacked by a greater number of sensations: all that surrounds him strikes him,

and strikes him forcibly.”

—  Claude-Adrien Helvétius (A Treatise on Man)

“The supply of government

exceeds the demand”

— Lewis Lapham

If I bear in mind the syllabus with which the class of 2003 has been engaged over the last four years, I don’t know how else to think of your invitation to deliver a commencement speech except as the proverbial praise from Caesar. I count it both as an honor and as a piece of luck because I’m always glad of the chance to try for an answer to the question, “What in God’s name are the humanities, and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?”

The standard set of answers read like funeral orations—newspaper columnists mourning the death of Western civilization, editors of alumni magazines likening the humanities to a suite of virgins set upon by Philistines or dogs, college deans talking about the precious ornaments of ancient art and modern literature buried in the tomb of a medieval library. The sanctimony is traditional, and invariably reminds me of a poem by Archibald MacLeish: “Freedom that was a thing to use / They’ve made a thing to save / And staked it in and fenced it round / Like a dead man’s grave.”

A mistake to think of the humanities as luxuries or as a decent appearance that must be kept up, like the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach. Necessities. I can think of no other set of studies more relevant to our present circumstance. Our technologists bear comparison to the sorcerer’s apprentice, producing continuously improved means toward increasingly ill-defined ends. Unless we look to the humanities to clean up the mess, we stand a better than even chance of killing ourselves with our new toys.

In its Renaissance usages, the word humanist connotes resourcefulness, skepticism, irony, and self-reliance, “refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” A character played by Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart, not by Hugh Grant; more to do with the cunning of Ulysses, great-hearted and wide wandering, than with the dithering of the cultural endowments in Washington or with the intrigues behind the arras of the English Department at Yale. Humanism is about the passion of thought and the will to understand, about Darwin sailing for the Galapagos or Dostoyevsky in trouble with the police, about Condorcet dying in a garret and hunted by agents of the guillotine, writing his outline of human progress so that he might hearten mankind by his vision of its possible perfections.

The imaginative taking of experience of the past can be put through as many paces as a well-trained circus horse. When I’m at a loss to remember why I read Tacitus or Molière, I think of the magician Merlin in T.H. White’s Once and Future King, seated under a willow tree and presenting the young Prince Arthur with a certain cure for melancholy:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

Among my own teachers, the one nearest in spirit to T.H. White’s Merlin turned up forty years ago under a potted palm tree in a New York City restaurant under the name of Otto Friedrich. In the heyday of what was then called “The New Journalism,” Otto was the managing editor of The Saturday Evening Post, and I was one of the magazine’s newly recruited contract writers. When I first met him in the autumn of 1962 he seemed a remote and professorial figure—tall and heavyset but with the stooped posture of a man accustomed to bending over books, taciturn, unsentimental, and matter-of-fact, given to wearing the same rumpled suit for days on end, not yet fifty but seeming as old as Merlin’s owl. Over the course of the next five years, listening to him talk about the last months of the Roman Empire or Mozart’s attachment to the key of E flat with the same degree of certainty that he brought to a discussion of the Kennedy administration’s geopolitical game theory, I understood that he joined a scholar’s love of learning with a journalist’s boundless curiosity. Free of cant and incapable of hypocrisy, Otto taught by example instead of by precept, patiently and with an unstinting kindness that he took a good deal of trouble to conceal behind a show of churlishness. He was as suspicious of metaphors as he was of politicians, and because he was a better writer than all but a few (a very few) of the more famous authors whose work he ushered into the light of print I seldom quarreled with his judgment. Otto never indulged a writer with the sloppy display of adjectives that he associated with publishers’ blurbs and lipstick advertisements, and the best that could be hoped for was that the manuscript might pass inspection without attracting a scourge of marginal notes (“empty phrase,” “wrong word,” “absurdity”) that indicated not only a redrafting of the text but also the jettisoning of its presumed topic. By the time the Post ceased publication in the spring of 1969 I had come to recognize him as a man who summed up in his life and turn of mind what I take to be the meaning of the word humanist.

Gallery

Over the course of a life that didn’t allow him much time to write, he published fourteen books, and when he died at the age of sixty-six in 1995, he had a list of twenty other books in mind, among them biographies of Richard Wagner, Saint Paul, and Attila the Hun, a man whom he regarded as “much misunderstood, and far more worthy than his Roman enemy.” Otto wrote books in the way that other people wander off into forests, chasing his intellectual enthusiasms as if they were obscure butterflies or rare mushrooms—books about roses and Édouard Manet’s Olympia, extended essays about Scarlatti, the Albigensian Crusade, the siege of Monte Cassino and the fires of Auschwitz, books about Berlin in the 1920s and Hollywood in the 1940s, biographies of Glenn Gould and Helmuth von Moltke—a historian in the amateur tradition of Henry AdamsBernard DeVoto, and Walter Karp. Otto ignored the apparatus of academic scholarship and approached the study of history in the same spirit that he approached Mozart’s piano concertos. “The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly,” he once said, “is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his number twenty-seven, humbly, every six months or so.”

Otto was never at a loss for a story to tell, if not about drifting ships then about earthquakes, or flowering trees, or the company of the Christian miracles gathered on the island of Iona. His life was not without sorrow—two of his children born disabled, his right eye gone blind with disease, none of his books profitable enough to release him from his chores as an editor, a siege of mental illness so severe that for a year it brought him near insanity—but like the Merlin imagined by T.H. White, he found that the best thing for being sad was to learn something. Although he was well versed in the “trembling of the anatomies,” I never once heard him complain of his misfortunes, and I suspect that he had little liking or patience for the kind of people—quite a few of them writers of large reputation—who display their afflictions as if they were made of gold lace. Otto believed that we are all caught up in the telling of stories (some more complicated and more beautiful than others, many of them incoherent, a few of them immortal), and he assumed that no matter how well or how poorly we manage the plot, we are all of us engaged in the same enterprise, all of us seeking evocations or representations of what we can recognize as appropriately human.

On the afternoon of May 24, 1995, in Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue in New York City the memorial service began with the playing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and as I listened to the theme presenting itself in a succession of different rhythms and voices, I thought of Otto setting the libretto of human feeling to the counterpoint of time. The music shifted to an aria from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, and I remembered that two years before going to Paris in the summer of 1948, Otto had traveled around Europe to pay his respects to various artists in whose work he had found inspiration. “Barging in on living monuments,” he once said, “a tourist collecting a generation.” At Rapallo in the north of Italy Otto invited himself to tea with Sir Max and Lady Beerbohm; in Rome he found George Santayana, reclining in striped pajamas on his bed at the Convent of the Blue Nuns. In Munich he briefly took piano lessons with Joseph Pembauer, who was said to have been a pupil of Liszt, and on the terrace of the Grand Hotel in Lausanne, he accosted Richard Strauss, by then a bent and white-haired man of eighty-two, with the first pages of a piano concerto he had begun to write on the voyage from New York. The elderly lady accompanying the composer on his afternoon walk angrily waved Otto out of sight, never guessing what it was that Otto had come to say or that forty-nine years later, on Lexington Avenue and East 53rd Street, the music of Der Rosenkavalier would oversee the departure of Otto’s civilizing spirit.

Within the profession of journalism I often have heard it said that the truth shall make men free, but it was Otto who taught me what the phrase means. The truth isn’t about the acquisition of doctrine or the assimilation of statistics, not even about the chicanery in Washington or the scandal in Santa Monica. It’s about the courage to trust one’s own thought and observation, to possess one’s own history, speak in one’s own voice. Most of Otto’s books never sold more than a few thousand copies, but although he knew that the reading and writing of history settles nothing (neither the grocer’s bill, the argument in the faculty lounge, nor next year’s election), he also knew that the study of history is the proof of our kinship with a larger whole and a wider self, with those who have gone before and those who will come after, and that we have nothing else with which to build the future except the wreckage of the past. Time destroys all things, but from the ruin of families and empires we preserve what we find useful or beautiful or true; on our way to death we make of what we have found the hope of our immortality.

Stories move from truth to facts, not the other way around, but in the attempt to convey the essence of a thing the teller of tales must give it a name, an age, and an address, and when I see the world devastated by evil lunatics, I think of Otto Friedrich, sick or in pain, blind in one eye, playing Bach’s Partita in C Minor on a winter night on a piano badly out of tune, planning his next raid on the kingdom of the past, wondering how he might hearten himself and his fellow men with a story not yet told.

Most of what I know about the composition of English prose I learned from Otto Friedrich, who also gave me to understand that very few of the world’s powers can do you irreparable harm if you don’t make the mistake of running a con game on the unique character and specific temper of your own mind, and that most of the political arguments going on in the world at the present moment are the same ones that enlivened the scaffolds of Renaissance Italy and the annals of Imperial Rome—the old and bitter quarrels between time past and time future, between the inertia of things as they are and the energy inherent in the hope of things as they might become.

The former and more portly faction invariably commands the popular majority. It is the party of military parades and Late Night with David Letterman, of Time magazine, Steven Spielberg movies, and the oil-company lobbyists working the halls of Congress. All of you belong, by definition if not by choice, to the party of things-as-they-might-become. Don’t underestimate the guile of your enemies. The servants of the status quo like to say that nothing is seriously amiss, that this is the best of all possible worlds, that the wisdom in office, whether at the White House or on the set of Nightline, brooks neither impertinence nor contradiction.

The authorities rest the case for their assurance on two lines of false reasoning. First, that the future is so dangerous that only football captains need apply, that everything is very difficult, very complicated and very far beyond the grasp of mere mortals who never have sailed up the Nile with Henry Kissinger. Second, that because this is the best of all possible worlds, nothing important remains to be said or discovered. The media have a hand in both of these deceptions, and I speak from some experience when I say that the fear of the future sells newspapers and bids up the market for cheap miracles and expensive cosmetics. The enormous acquisitions and disseminations of knowledge over the past twenty years (about nuclear physics, cancer cells, the history of Germany, terrorism, and the chemistry of bats) have brought forth corresponding gains in the levels of anxiety. Hardly a day passes without somebody naming yet another substance (previously thought to be harmless) that can kill or maim everybody in downtown Los Angeles. The evil omens decorate the seven o’clock news, and every self-respecting newsletter announces the depletion of the reserves of deutschemarks, sunlight, and conscience. The seers who look into the abyss of the millennium predict catastrophes appropriate to the fears of the audiences they have been paid to alarm. During the span of a single week at Harper’s Magazine I once received the galley proofs of three new books entitled, in order of their arrival, The End of NatureThe End of Science, and The End of History.

The rumors are as exaggerated as the ones about Saddam Hussein’s inventory of nuclear weapons. It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and most of the people who magnify its risks do so for reasons of their own. Jealous of a future apt to render them ridiculous or irrelevant, they bear comparison to the French noblewoman, a duchess in her eighties, who, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfiers’ balloon from the palace of the Tuileries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. “Oh yes,” she said, “now it’s certain. One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead.”

To disprove the second proposition, you have only to consult the listings in any newspaper—any week, any edition—to know that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are still at large on five continents and seven oceans. The headlines give the lie to the assertion that the servants of the status quo know why the word wags and who or what wags it. Quite clearly, almost everything remains to be done, said, or discovered; also quite clearly, the world stands in need of as much help as it can get, and if it doesn’t get that help from people like yourselves, then in whom does it place the hope of a new answer, or even better, a new question?

As a student at Yale in the 1950s I was taught to think of the twentieth century as the miraculous and happy ending of the story of human progress; I now think of it as a still primitive beginning. From the perspective of the thirtieth century, I expect the historians to look back upon the works of our modern world as if upon sand castles built by surprisingly gifted children.

When I was your age, I made the mistake of imagining the future as a destination—like Paris or Baltimore or the Gobi Desert—and I thought that in the so-called real world the people who ran the place were made of Greek marble or Gothic stone. As I grew older I began to notice, first to my surprise, and then to my alarm, that the more loudly the Wizards of Oz claimed to know all the answers, the less likely that they knew even a few of the questions. The walls of the establishment are made of paper, as often as not the fortress manned by soldiers already dead, propped like sandbags on the parapets of office. The party of things-as-they-are stages a great show of its magnificence in order to conceal its weakness and fear, and it makes small complaint if all the voters in California, New York, and Michigan wander through their lives in a passive stupor. As a nation we now spend upwards of $500 billion a year on liquor, pornography, and drugs, and the Cold War against the American intellect constitutes a more profitable business than the old arrangement with the Russians or the new arrangement with the viceroys of terrorist jihad.

The discussions in the newspapers about the sorrows of American education assume the existence of what the editorial writers like to call “the educated citizen.” To the best of my knowledge I have never met such a person; even the idea of an educated citizen strikes me as preposterous. I can conceive of a self-educating citizen, and I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who can be so described, none of them fool enough to proclaim themselves educated. Without exception they possess the valor of their ignorance, conceiving of education neither as a blessed state of being (comparable to membership in the Cosmos Club) nor as a material good sold in a store (even at Harvard’s rate of $34,000 per annum) but rather as a ceaseless process of learning and relearning. Few pleasures equal the joy of the mind when it’s being put to constructive and imaginative use, and if not to people like those of you on this lawn, to whom do we turn for a new equation, a new line of economic or political theory, a new lyric and a new song?

Mark Twain referred to such people as “the makers of the earth after God,” and you are lucky enough to have inherited not only the writings of Twain but also the mechanism of democratic self-government. Democracy allies itself with change and proceeds under the assumption that nobody knows enough, that nothing is final, that the old order (whether of men and women or institutions) will be carried offstage every twenty years. The plurality of democratic voices and forms assumes a ceaseless making and remaking—of laws and customs as well as of fortunes and matinee idols. Democratic government is a purpose held in common, and if it can be understood as a set of temporary coalitions among people of different interests, skills, and generations, then everybody has need of everybody else. To the extent that a democratic society gives its citizens the chance to chase its own dreams, it gives itself the chance not only of discovering its multiple glories and triumphs but also of surviving its multiple follies and crimes.

No matter what the season’s top billings in the American political circus are, the argument between the past and future tense falls along the division between the people who would continue the democratic experiment and those who think that the experiment has gone far enough. The freedom of thought and expression presents society with the unwelcome news that it is in trouble, but because all societies, like most individuals, are always in some kind of trouble, the news doesn’t cause them to perish. They die instead from the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to make time stand still. Liberty has ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to think for themselves. Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as it can ask of its own stupidity and fear. Idealism rescues cynicism, and the continued comfort of the party of things-as-they-are depends on the doubts placed under their pillows by the party of things-as-they-might-become. The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn’t waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant or a band, nor is it any further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life portrait that might become a masterpiece. The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will.

Below we feature a commencement speech by Lewis H. Lapham delivered on May 11, 2003, to the class of 2003 at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where the curriculum centers on the great books.

 

 

Swimming Pool Dimensions and Construction

University of Michigan | Washtenaw County

About Last Night: #Paris2024

A standard Olympic-sized swimming pool is defined by the following dimensions:

  • Length: 50 meters
  • Width: 25 meters
  • Depth: A minimum of 2 meters
  • Lanes: 10 lanes, each 2.5 meters wide

The total area of the pool is therefore 1,250 square meters, and it holds approximately 2,500 cubic meters (or 2.5 million liters) of water.

https://standardsmichigan.com/australia/

The organization that sets the standards for Olympic-sized pools is the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) — now World Aquatics — the governing body for swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming, and open water swimming. FINA establishes the regulations for the dimensions and equipment of competition pools used in international events, including the Olympic Games.

The top ten universities that have produced Olympic champion:

  1. University of Southern California (USC)
  2. Stanford University
  3. University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)
  4. University of Florida
  5. University of Texas at Austin
  6. University of Michigan – Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time.
  7. Indiana University
  8. Auburn University
  9. University of Georgia
  10. University of Arizona

News:

Swim Swam: 2024 Pool “Slow” and not setting records

Paris Olympics swimmers noticing pool is ‘slow’ 

Pool, Spa & Recreational Waters

Swimming, Water Polo and Diving Lighting

Uniform Swimming Pool, Spa & Hot Tub Code

Pool, Spa & Recreational Waters

“Innenansicht des Kaiserbades in Aachen” | Jan Luyken (1682)

Education communities provide a large market for recreational and therapeutic water technology suppliers.  Some of the larger research universities have dozens of pools including those in university-affiliated healthcare facilities.  Apart from publicly visible NCAA swimming programs there are whirpools in healthcare facilities and therapeutic tubs for athletes in other sports.   Ownership of these facilities requires a cadre of conformance experts to assure water safety.

NSF International is one of the first names in this space and has collaborated with key industry stakeholders to make pools, spas and recreational water products safer since 1949.   The parent document in its suite is NSF 50 Pool, Spa and Recreational Water Standards  which  covers everything from pool pumps, strainers, variable frequency drives and pool drains to suction fittings, grates, and ozone and ultraviolet systems.  

The workspace for this committee is linked below:

Joint Committee on Recreational Water Facilities

(Standards Michigan is an observer on this and several other NSF committees and is the only “eyes and ears” for the user interest; arguably the largest market for swimming pools given their presence in schools and universities.)

There are 14 task groups that drill into specifics such as the following:

Chemical feeders

Pool chemical evaluation

Flotation systems

Filters

Water quality

Safety surfacing

The meeting packet is confidential to registered attendees.  You may communicate directly with the NSF Joint Committee Chairperson, Mr. Tom Vyles (admin@standards.nsf.org) about arranging direct access as an observer or technical committee member.   

Almost all ANSI accredited technical committees have a shortage of user-interests (compliance officers, manufacturers and installers usually dominate).  We encourage anyone in the education facility industry paying the bill for the services of compliance officers, manufacturers and installers to participate. 

We maintain this title on the standing agenda of our Water and Sport colloquia.  See our CALENDAR for the next onine meeting; open to everyone.

Fullerton College

Issue: [13-89]

Category: Water, Sport

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Ron George, Larry Spielvogel


More

Model Aquatic Health Code

IAPMO Swimming Pool & Spa Standards 

UL 1081 Standard for Swimming Pool Pumps, Filters, and Chlorinators | (UL Standards tend to be product standards so we rank them lower in our priority ranking than interoperability standards.)

Aquatic Health Code

Storm Shelters

2024 GROUP A PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE I-CODES

Latest News and Documents

“Landscape between Storms” 1841 Auguste Renoir

 

When is it ever NOT storm season somewhere in the United States; with several hundred schools, colleges and universities in the path of them? Hurricanes also spawn tornadoes. This title sets the standard of care for safety, resilience and recovery when education community structures are used for shelter and recovery.  The most recently published edition of the joint work results of the International Code Council and the ASCE Structural Engineering Institute SEI-7 is linked below:

2020 ICC/NSSA 500 Standard for the Design and Construction of Storm Shelters.

Given the historic tornados in the American Midwest this weekend, its relevance is plain.  From the project prospectus:

The objective of this Standard is to provide technical design and performance criteria that will facilitate and promote the design, construction, and installation of safe, reliable, and economical storm shelters to protect the public. It is intended that this Standard be used by design professionals; storm shelter designers, manufacturers, and constructors; building officials; and emergency management personnel and government officials to ensure that storm shelters provide a consistently high level of protection to the sheltered public.

This project runs roughly in tandem with the ASCE Structural Engineering Institute SEI-17 which has recently updated its content management system and presented challenges to anyone who attempts to find the content where it used to be before the website overhaul.    In the intervening time, we direct stakeholders to the link to actual text (above) and remind education facility managers and their architectural/engineering consultants that the ICC Code Development process is open to everyone.

The ICC receives public response to proposed changes to titles in its catalog at the link below:

Standards Public Forms

2024/2025/2026 ICC CODE DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

You are encouraged to communicate with Kimberly Paarlberg (kpaarlberg@iccsafe.org) for detailed, up to the moment information.  When the content is curated by ICC staff it is made available at the link below:

ICC cdpACCESS

We maintain this title on the agenda of our periodic Disaster colloquia which approach this title from the point of view of education community facility managers who collaborate with structual engineers, architects and emergency management functionaries..   See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting, open to everyone.

Readings:

FEMA: Highlights of ICC 500-2020

ICC 500-2020 Standard and Commentary: ICC/NSSA Design and Construction of Storm Shelters

IEEE: City Geospatial Dashboard: IoT and Big Data Analytics for Geospatial Solutions Provider in Disaster Management

 

Rhubarb Strawberry Pie

Recipe

A dessert  popular in the United Kingdom, where rhubarb has been cultivated since the 1600s, and the leaf stalks eaten since the 1700s. Besides diced rhubarb, it almost always contains a large amount of sugar to balance the intense tartness of the plant. The pie is usually prepared with a bottom pie crust and a variety of styles of upper crust.

In the United States, often a lattice-style upper crust is used.  This pie is a traditional dessert in the United States. It is part of New England cuisine.  Rhubarb has long been a popular choice for pies in the Great Plains region and the Michigan Great Lakes Region, where fruits were not always readily available in the spring

Related

University of Missouri: Plant rhubarb, the pie plant, in March

University of Nebraska: Rhubarb Cream Pie

TU Dublin: Rhubarb Pie Using Sweet Shortbread Pastry

Strawberries

Kitchens 200

Food Safety

Cold Brew

This content is accessible to paid subscribers. To view it please enter your password below or send mike@standardsmichigan.com a request for subscription details.

“What Wondrous Love”

St. Olaf Choir in NorwayIn the Fjords

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The authorship of the hymn “What Wondrous Love Is This?” is unknown, and it is believed to be a traditional American folk hymn that emerged in the early 19th century. The hymn is sometimes attributed to American composer and music educator William Walker, who included it in his songbook “Southern Harmony” in 1835.   It has  become a beloved hymn in many Christian traditions, particularly during the season of Lent and Holy Week, as it helps worshippers reflect on the depth and meaning of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.

History of Western Civilization Told Through the Acoustics of its Worship Spaces

Standards Minnesota

St. Olaf Facilities Department

sport, mercury, athletic

Track & Field

Aphrodite and Hermes, god of sport

Gustavus Adolphus College | Nicollet County Minnesota

 

Recreational sports, athletic competition, and the facilities that support it, are one of the most visible activities in any school, college or university in any nation.  Arguably, these activities resemble religious belief and practice.   Enterprises of this kind have the same ambition for safety and sustainability at the same scale as the academic and healthcare enterprises.  

According to IBISWorld Market Research, Sports Stadium Construction was a $6.1 billion market in 2014, Athletic & Sporting Goods Manufacturing was a $9.2 billion market in 2015, with participation in sports increasing 19.3 percent by 2019 — much of that originating in school, college and university sports and recreation programs.  We refer you to more up to date information in the link below:

Sports & Athletic Field Construction Industry in the US – Market Research Report

Today at the usual time we will update our understanding of the physical support systems for the track and field activity listed below:

  1. Sprinting: Races over short distances, typically 100m, 200m, and 400m.
  2. Middle-distance running: Races covering distances between sprinting and long-distance running, such as 800m and 1500m.
  3. Long-distance running: Races over longer distances, including 3000m, 5000m, 10,000m, and marathons.
  4. Hurdling: Races where athletes jump over hurdles at set distances, such as 110m hurdles (for men) and 100m hurdles (for women).
  5. Steeplechase: A long-distance race that includes hurdles and a water jump.
  6. Racewalking: A form of walking competition where athletes race over various distances while maintaining contact with the ground.
  7. Relays: Team races where athletes take turns running a specified distance before passing a baton to the next runner. Common relay distances include 4x100m and 4x400m.
  8. High jump: Athletes attempt to jump over a horizontal bar placed at measured heights without knocking it down.
  9. Pole vault: Athletes use a pole to vault themselves over a high bar.
  10. Long jump: Athletes sprint down a runway and jump as far as possible into a sandpit.
  11. Triple jump: Athletes perform a hop, step, and jump sequence into a sandpit, with distances measured from the takeoff board to the nearest mark made in the sand by any part of the body.
  12. Shot put: Athletes throw a heavy metal ball for distance.
  13. Discus throw: Athletes throw a discus, a heavy circular object, for distance.
  14. Javelin throw: Athletes throw a javelin, a spear-like object, for distance.
  15. Hammer throw: Athletes throw a heavy metal ball attached to a wire and handle for distance.
  16. Decathlon (men) / Heptathlon (women): Multi-event competitions where athletes compete in ten (decathlon) or seven (heptathlon) different track and field events, with points awarded for performance in each event.

Open to everyone.  Log in with the credentials at the upper right of our home page.

Issue: [19-46]

Category: Athletics and Recreation, International,

Contact: Mike Anthony, Jack Janveja, Christine Fischer


More

The “Sugaring” Season

Standards Vermont

Vermont is the largest producer of maple syrup in the United States, and the maple syrup industry is an important part of the state’s economy and culture. Vermont maple syrup is renowned for its high quality and distinctive flavor, and many people around the world seek out Vermont maple syrup specifically.

The maple syrup industry in Vermont is primarily made up of small-scale family farms, where maple sap is collected from sugar maple trees in early spring using a process called “sugaring.” The sap is then boiled down to produce pure maple syrup, which is graded according to its color and flavor. Vermont maple syrup is graded on a scale from Grade A (lighter in color and milder in flavor) to Grade B (darker in color and more robust in flavor).

The Vermont maple syrup industry is heavily regulated to ensure quality and safety, and the state has strict standards for labeling and grading maple syrup. In addition to pure maple syrup, many Vermont maple producers also make maple candy, maple cream, and other maple products.

University of Vermont Facilities Management

Vermont

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