The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [184]
End of Chapter Notes
3. Slugging percentage (SLG) = (1B) + (2B × 2) + (3B × 3) + (HR × 4)/AB. Walks are excluded from this calculation and were long undervalued in baseball, something Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics capitalized on to create an incomprehensibly successful team on almost no budget, as described in Moneyball.
4. I’m indebted to Professor Robert Adair, Sterling Professor Emeritus of physics at Yale University and author of the classic The Physics of Baseball, for this help with these numbers. His commentary: “The distances vary with the air temperature, wind velocity, and backspin of the ball. Also, we don’t have perfect values for the air resistance, which varies a little with the ball axis of rotation.… I took the backspins as 1,030 rpm and 1,260 rpm. The balls will go a little further at 40 degrees (57.31) and 35 degrees (70.08).” The projected distances varied for almost every PhD Jaime and I consulted, but the before-after differences were always large. Some physicists predicted slightly more significant increases approximating 50%, from roughly 180 feet to roughly 250 feet when accounting for air resistance.
HOW TO HOLD YOUR BREATH LONGER THAN HOUDINI
I am pushing myself as far as I can humanly push myself … I can only hope for the best and expect the worst.
—David Blaine
Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
—L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
David Blaine first became interested in magic at age four, when his grandmother bought him a deck of Tarot cards.
One year later, at the ripe age of five, he announced to his mom that he wanted to be a showman. Why? There was an older man in the neighborhood who sat on his apartment stoop and never displayed any emotion. David had used one of his card tricks to make him laugh.
By the time Blaine was a teenager, magic and illusion consumed all of his free time. He would later describe it as “like an addiction, an obsessive compulsive disorder.”5
His deft close-up card effects caught the eye of billionaire Jeffrey Steiner at a bar mitzvah gig, and Steiner decided to take the then-18-year-old David to Saint-Tropez to impress house guests. In short order, David was performing for Jack Nicholson, and the streets of Brooklyn had been replaced by playgrounds for the rich and famous.
It was just the beginning.
By 2002 he was on top of the world. Literally. Looking for challenges beyond illusion, David stood unharnessed at the top of an 83-foot-tall, 22-inch-wide column in New York’s Bryant Park until he hallucinated. It took 35 hours for the buildings behind him to become animal heads. He then jumped off into nothing but cardboard boxes.
David’s new label: endurance artist.
He had been buried alive in April 1999, spending a week underground in a plastic coffin. He ate and drank nothing but a few tablespoons of water each day.
He had been frozen alive in November 2000, encasing himself in a block of ice for nearly 64 hours. The ice was broken away with chainsaws, and he spent a month in recovery before he could walk again.
Impressive, yes. But these stunts didn’t satisfy him. Looking for bigger and bolder challenges, he set his sights on the breath-holding world record. How hard could it be to fake? He tried having a breathing tube the size of a vacuum hose pushed down his throat under sedation. It failed. All of his attempts failed. Then it occurred to him that he could simply bite the bullet and take the craziest approach of all: actually holding his breath.
Traveling from Navy SEAL training to the tropics, he figured it out. Then, for four months, David held the Guinness world record for oxygen-assisted static apnea (holding your breath after breathing pure oxygen): 17 minutes and 4.4 seconds.
His record was surpassed by