swimming

How Many Pools are There in Los Angeles?

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How many swimming pools are there in Los Angeles? That’s the big question that two academics pondered and decided to solve, according to this Los Angeles Times piece:

A year later, the result is the “Big Atlas of L.A. Pools,” a digital analysis of every swimming pool in the Los Angeles Basin. Using complex computer mapping, they counted 43,123 between the Hollywood Hills and San Pedro, from pools shaded by leaf-covered pergolas in Santa Monica to ones surrounded by chain-link fences in Alhambra.

Along the way, they discovered something more than just the real-world versions of the iconic David Hockney pool utopias. Their project also proved that two non-experts were able to take a massive amount of freely available data to peek into other people’s lives.

Some interesting statistics:

Their research, which fills 6,000 pages in 74 printed volumes, concludes that the typical swimming pool in Los Angeles is oval-shaped and measures 16 feet, 4 inches by 33 feet, 6 inches, though there are numerous oddly shaped pools squeezed into backyards.

The atlas found that Beverly Hills has 2,481 — the highest per capita in the region. Long Beach boasts 2,859 pools, Rancho Palos Verdes 2,592. They could not come up with a total for the city of Los Angeles, because their count left out the San Fernando Valley, although the Brentwood section of the city has 1,920.

But two other Los Angeles neighborhoods have no backyard pools at all: Watts and Florence. Of the four public pools in area parks, three were apparently closed for the season and empty when the satellite photo was taken, said Catarah Hampshire, a spokeswoman with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation.

Yes, the ease of data access is unnerving. But you know what else is great? The byline associated with the piece. Great work.

Also worth seeing is the researchers’s voyeuristic take on the swimming pools in this video titled “The LA Swimmer”:

 

 

On Skinny Dipping in New York City

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A fun and interesting piece about what people have to do to go skinny-dipping in the New York City area:

But skinny-dipping is something different, its acolytes say. A term coined in the late 1940s, it connotes both quickness — a dip — and transgression, a departure from the old painted scenes of bathing in rivers. (The skinny part, linguists have argued, most likely refers to skin, not thinness.)

“It’s about spontaneity and freedom in the moment,” said Lauren Christianson, 23, who along with two partners is working on a guide to skinny-dipping around the city for their Web site, The Skinny Dipping Report. “You can’t go in the East River or the Gowanus Canal. You have to find these secret spots.”

One spot eyed for the list, a hot tub at the New York Loft Hostel in Bushwick, may need to be reconsidered. The hot tub was taken out last year, a receptionist there said, after becoming an occasional clothing-optional hangout. The removal was “very possibly for that reason,” she said.

A minor offense most often classified as either “exposure of a person” (a violation) or public lewdness (a misdemeanor), it is not the sort of crime that makes the blotter in New York, as it might elsewhere. Faced with a boisterous bunch of naked swimmers, many officers just shake their heads. “Move along” is more likely to be heard than “You’re under arrest.”

I guess you can consider the officers assigned to give out summons/tickets for this behavior as a sort of mild hazing?

“Usually a junior guy will get stuck with that assignment,” said Sgt. Grant Arthur of the United States Park Police, which patrols the area. “They’ll just come right up and start talking, get real close, telling the officer how good he looks in uniform. Nothing bad — it’s kind of funny. We put the new guys down there, and it’ll kind of catch them off guard.”

Racing Against History in the 100-Meter Freestyle

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The New York Times has a really good interactive comparing the various milestones in the men’s 100-meter freestyle swim. Based on the athletes’ average speeds, if every Olympic medalist ever raced each other, France’s Alain Bernard (from the 2008 Olympic Games, with a time of 47.21 seconds) would win, with a wide distribution of Olympians behind him, including the 2012 London Olympics winner, Nathan Adrian, with a time of 47.52 seconds.

Other swimmers profiled in the interactive:

Alfréd Hajós: Hungary’s first Olympic gold medalist, Hajós swam in 55-degree open water, in the Bay of Zea outside Piraeus, Greece. He also won the 1,200-meter swim.

Johnny Weissmuller (United States): The first swimmer to break a minute in the Olympics. Later went on to play Tarzan in “Tarzan the Ape Man,” which made him internationally famous.

Mark Spitz (United States): Won seven gold medals in the 1972 Games in Munich; nearly withdrew from the 100-meter event because he wasn’t sure if he would win. (He did, setting a world record.)

Alexander Popov (Russia): One of only three athletes with three medals in this event; the first person in 68 years to win back-to-back golds after Weissmuller did it in 1928.

The two and a half minute video is worth seeing in entirety.