all posts tagged “olympics”
How a Coin is Solving One of the World's Great Explanation Problems
Posted by: leelefever on January 9, 2012- 10:07am
Categories: coin, Explanation, explanationproblems, olympics
I grew up playing soccer and over the past few years, Sachi and I have become bigger fans than ever, especially for our hometown Seattle Sounders. The rules of soccer came pretty easily to Sachi who didn't play as a youngster - with one huge exception: the offsides rule. I tried to point it out at matches, explain the idea, etc. Eventually, visuals did the trick and now she's the one throwing her arms in the air.
Indeed, the offsides rule has a serious, worldwide explanation problem. It's adoption is limited by how the idea is being explained. And looking forward to The 2012 Olympics in London, this is an explanation problem that's ripe for a solution.
Enter Neil Wolfson, who won a competition to design a coin which was sport related for a series to celebrate the Olympics. According to Wolfson:
"I'm a football fan, I followed the Premier League since its inception and if I had 50p for every time someone had asked me to explain the offside rule I'd be a very rich man.""When the coin is in circulation I hope people like it and I hope people are able to use it to explain the offside rule."
So, the coin is a visual aid meant to be used in concert with a verbal explanation. Sounds familiar. The real magic of this explanation though, is that it also buys beer.
To finish up China week, I'd like to share some of our favorite photos from China. Enjoy the Olympics!
Shanghai from the Pearl City Tower
A squished pig from a Nanjing market.
Summer Palace
Locks on Yellow Mountain. You might remember these from The Amazing Race.
Li River, near Yangshou, China
Li River Karsts, via Guilin, China.
It was a sunny day in Shanghai. The umbrellas (parasoles?) were to block the sun.
Yangtze River - Three Gorges
Grand Hyatt Atrium, JinMao Tower, Shanghai.
No, she was not chopping off my head with a giant knife. I was getting a haircut and, much to my surprise, I got a massage too. They even cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. I think I'll be the only person sticking anything in my ears in the future.
Sachi at the Great Wall. But you probably figured that out yourself. You might enjoy reading about our Mutiny on the way to the Great Wall.
OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming...
Below is a short story that was posted to our travel blog from Shanghai. Almost any visitor to China is likely to experience a higher-than-expected level of competiion while standing in line for something like a subway ticket. In the case below, I had made up my mind to be a competitor. Unfortunately things didn't work out as planned.
From the post: Lessons in Line Breaking
I had made a decision and I was going to act on it. Gone were the days of standing passively in line while Chinese people wedge themselves in front of me and place an order before I could react. I was going stand up for myself and try to be a little more Chinese.
This is not the kind of thing you can plan – it just has to happen and just last night, I had my chance. We were in the Shanghai subway terminal in line for our first subway card at a vending machine, as we’ve done so many times before in other cities. Just as the couple in front of me at the machine received their card and turned away, a young Chinese guy stepped directly in front of me. So, with great determination, I stepped in front of him enough to place my right shoulder at about his eye level and in a single motion stepped directly in front of the vending machine. It was mine! HAHA! I’ll show you line breaker! I’m no push-over tourist softy!
So there I was, with this foreign and unfamiliar machine staring me in the face. It was mine, yes, but I realized all too quickly that I had no idea how to use it. The instructions were in English and the #1 read “Select Fare???. Scratching my head with waves of embarrassment pending, I searched the machine for anything that said “Fare???. Nothing. I inquisitively pressed a couple of random buttons in the hopes that something would happen. Nothing. My pride was on the line here and I was blowing it! Thoughts of fleeing in shame entered my mind when I heard a voice over my shoulder, “Where do you need to go???? It was the line breaker politely asking a simple question that I couldn’t answer completely. All we knew was that we needed to go two stops on Line 2. He ended up doing the whole transaction for me and after many “thank yous??? I left with our subway cards in hand and my pride more than a little crushed.
The moral here is that if you’re going to try to act like a local, be prepared for the entire event. Going off half-cocked is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot.
If making signs in Chinese characters was my job, I would be very, very bad at it. However, I might hire someone who knows the language well before erecting a permanent sign at a major tourist destination. For a long time, this didn't happen in China and we snapped the photos below before they invested in changing the signs for the Olympics.
The guy in this photo is one of the most interesting people I've ever met. He's the blind adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber.(notice the broken cane, his favorite schtick) Photo is from the Three Gorges Dam. He did not turn over.
I never could figure out why they wanted to protect the railings. This was at the Summer Palace, where I felt compelled to write a rant about tourism and tour groups.
An earnest request at Yellow Mountain. Most tourist travel in China (outside the cities) is controlled. Most people are herded onto busses and kept in a group, led by a flag-bearing guide who speaks English and may use a megaphone. We are very independent travelers and grew quite tired of these guides.
At the Three Gorges Dam.
I didn't take it as a compliment.
I think they meant "crab"
4 Stars!
And finally, not a sign, but an illustration of a difference in culture. I present to you, on the busy streets of Beijing - a car-to-car turtle salesman.
Reading back through this, it may appear that we didn't like China. I would say that the tourist experience in China, compared to other places, was not as enjoyable. We were only there a month, which is far too short of a time to know if we really like it or not. We left the country wondering what would change before the Olympics and what Westerners would say upon returning.
In honor of the start of the Beijing Olympics, we've decided to make it "China Week" here on the Common Craft blog.
In a lot of ways, China was where we first started to experiment with video. We bought our first video camera (a Sony DCR - PC 1000) in Hong Kong, just before spending about a month in mainland China in 2006. Over the time in China, we edited and posted our first "real" videos.
This week, we'll share a few of those videos and some stories from our time there. It's stuff you won't see on NBC, I promise.
To get us started, here is a 3 minute video that focuses on local food from Chongqing, a giant city in the Sichuan Province. Please note that what I call "rodent heads" may actually be rabbit heads (rabbits aren't rodents). Anyway, enjoy...
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