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Isn't there some confusion here between who is fastest in a particular Pool, and the validity of "World Records" calculated to 100 th's of a second when Pools may be imperfectly measured?

A case in point being the huge amount of money currently being expended (stripping tiles, planing concrete etc)to extend London's Crystal Palace Pool from its current 49.98m to 50.00m.....

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Tue Aug 26th, 2008 at 03:55:21 AM EST
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Not really. My argument is that the ends of the pools are not perfectly parallel to the millimeter, so the courses are not equally long even in the same pool.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue Aug 26th, 2008 at 04:11:33 AM EST
[ Parent ]
There are two different issues: For comparing competitors in a single race, only the variation of the pool size over the various lanes matters (and the quality of time keeping). For comparing competitors over several races (eg over time in different olympics) the variation over different swimming pools also matters. Generally, since swimming pools in different countries are built by different contractors, it's plausible that the variation between pools is higher than the variation between individual lane lengths. The time keeping tolerances are much smaller, so can be ignored, at least over the last 30-50 years I'd say, and anything older is not worth bothering with.

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$E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
by martingale on Tue Aug 26th, 2008 at 05:08:04 AM EST
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