The operational aesthetic in the performance of professional wrestling

This study analyzes the relationship between professional wrestling as performance and its fans. For decades, professional wrestling has been characterized as a fraudulent sport of scams and illusion rather than actual and fair competition between athletes. Why then is wrestling so popular? I pursue the question by taking a close look at professional wrestling in four different cultural venues or sites of production: the historical archive, the live wrestling event, the televised event, and the Internet. In each site, I focus on what components define professional wrestling, how they operate, and what appears to be their purpose. Drawing on Neil Harris\u27s concept of an operational aesthetic, I feature components that expose rather than veil their operations and thereby invite the audiences to scrutinize how they work. In addition to Harris, I call on several other theorists to articulate what operations are revealed, and the results or ramifications of the exposure. Roland Barthes and John Fiske help me understand the event as a spectacle of excess. I also use Barthes\u27 and Fiske\u27s models of readerly, writerly, and producerly texts to analyze the relationship between the event and the fans. The theories and perspectives of Harris, Barthes, and Fiske summon aspects of Bertolt Brecht\u27s aims for theatre. By means of devices that expose rather than veil the apparatus of theatre, Brecht hoped to provoke audience members to be like sporting experts in their passionate critical viewing of the event. The results of the study suggest that wrestling fans understand and value wrestling because it is a performance and because they play a part in producing it. Far from being duped by the wrestling illusion, fans are able to enjoy wrestling with a double voice, producing pleasurable meanings for themselves through critical detachment and critical detachment through pleasure

An Electron Diffraction Investigation of Dimethylketene Dimer

An electron diffraction investigation of dimethylketene dimer confirms the 2,2,4,4-tetramethylcyclobutadione-1,3 structure. The following parameters were determined for the symmetrical model: C[Single Bond]C (ring)=1.56±0.05A, C[Single Bond]CH3=1.54±0.05A, C[Double Bond]O=1.22±0.04A, [angle]C[Single Bond]CO[Single Bond]C=93°±6°, and [angle]CH3[Single Bond]C[Single Bond]CH3=111°±6°. The limits of error assigned to the angles apply only if simultaneous variation is excluded; otherwise much larger limits must be assigned. A notable feature of the structure is the large temperature factor which must be ascribed to the interatomic distances greater than 3A. The relation of this temperature factor to the unusually large atom polarization is discussed in terms of the probable amplitudes of the pertinent modes of vibration of the molecule

A comparison of the stability and performance of depth-integrated ice-dynamics solvers

In the last decade, the number of ice-sheet models has increased substantially, in line with the growth of the glaciological community. These models use solvers based on different approximations of ice dynamics. In particular, several depth-integrated dynamics solvers have emerged as fast solvers capable of resolving the relevant physics of ice sheets at the continental scale. However, the numerical stability of these schemes has not been studied systematically to evaluate their effectiveness in practice. Here we focus on three such solvers, the so-called Hybrid, L1L2-SIA and DIVA solvers, as well as the well-known SIA and SSA solvers as boundary cases. We investigate the numerical stability of these solvers as a function of grid resolution and the state of the ice sheet for an explicit time discretization scheme of the mass conservation step. Under simplified conditions with constant viscosity, the maximum stable time step of the Hybrid solver, like the SIA solver, has a quadratic dependence on grid resolution. In contrast, the DIVA solver has a maximum time step that is independent of resolution as the grid becomes increasingly refined, like the SSA solver. A simple 1D implementation of the L1L2-SIA solver indicates that it should behave similarly, but in practice, the complexity of its implementation appears to restrict its stability. In realistic simulations of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a nonlinear rheology, the DIVA and SSA solvers maintain superior numerical stability, while the SIA, Hybrid and L1L2-SIA solvers show markedly poorer performance. At a grid resolution of Delta x = 4 km, the DIVA solver runs approximately 20 times faster than the Hybrid and L1L2-SIA solvers as a result of a larger stable time step. Our analysis shows that as resolution increases, the ice-dynamics solver can act as a bottleneck to model performance. The DIVA solver emerges as a clear outlier in terms of both model performance and its representation of the ice-flow physics itself

A Community Ice Sheet Model for Sea Level Prediction

Summary of a workshop that was held at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, 18-20 August 2008, whose primary goal was to create a detailed plan for developing, testing, and implementing a Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) to aid in predicting sea level rise