Hello all, I just got my ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) News in the mail today. I thought an article in this paper would be of interest to some on this delightful and exciting listserve, so I am going to quote a small section of it for your reading enjoyment. The title of the article is: Fine-tuning construction of baseballs raises safety questions. The author is Benedict Bahner. "Last year, with the major league baseball strike about to go into full swing in the United States, Henry Scarton hit on another way to maintain his interest in the game. Intrigued by the recent controversy over the rising number of out-of-the-park home runs, Scarton began to wonder if the explanation could be related to the baseball's dynamic hardness, a characteristic he believed could be measured using a patented method that he had developed to test piano hammers for the piano manufacturer Steinway & Sons... Baseballs are not currently measured by their hardness. They are categorized by their "liveliness." with a coefficient of restitution number that represents the speed of a ball before and after it hits a wall. In the sports applications of Scarton's SDH testing method - which he developed with student ASME members Peter Giacobbe and Yau-Shing Lee - a baseball's hardness is measured by the vibrations it emits on impact. Vibrational responses in pianos and baseballs are similar, Scarton said. Piano strings that are hit with a felt-tipped hammer produce a richer sound because the harmonics of the strings that are excited are reduced. That vibration principal can be applied to a moving baseball, Scarton said. When a standard baseball hits the rib cage, the bones absorb the vibration much like piano strings. Because the frequencies emitted by a soft-center baseball are lower, Scarton said, the rib cage does not absorb the vibrations on impact. If the rib cage doesn't dispel that extra energy, it will be absorbed by the soft, vulnerable tissue underneath - principally the heart. In slow speed testing of a variety of balls - regular baseballs, softer-core baseballs, softballs, even Ping-Pong balls and bowling balls - Scarton found that although the soft-center baseballs had a lower peak force on impact, which could reduce the severity of injuries in players who were hit in the head, Scarton suspected the lower impact vibrations they emitted could interrupt the heart's regular rhythm and induce the potentially fatal condition, heart arrhythmia." It gives me a warm-fuzzy kinda feeling when I see a piano plastered on the front page of my ASME newsletter. Cheers, Dan Squire
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