The science of making things up as you go along

Oli from Roger Gracie’s club came to visit our JJ dojo last week. It was a good session with him offering to roll with the guys and share some techniques. Well it was ok until he sparred with me and somehow ended up popping his knee. Oops. I bet he now thinks it was all a ploy to eliminate him as a potential competing dojo – but it was an honest accident.

Meerkat’s day job is to produce photographic feature stories for the Science Photo Library. And I have been thinking of ways to combine my two passions (science and martial arts) into one feature. It’s taken about five years of thinking in fact but finally, I have completed the story. It will be aimed at the 12-17 year old market of kids who are healthily into computer games and kungfu movies. The story will be something cheesy like ‘’How to be a black belt in 10 easy steps’ but it’s a thinly disguised article on biomechanics, Newtonian physics, anatomy and medicine. Well that’s the plan, I haven’t quite finished it yet, but once it is finished, I will cobble together some photos from the SPL collection and offer it to youth mags. There are some interesting facts I found out in research, like human bone is 40 times stronger than concrete, and that a karate expert can punch at a speed of 24 miles per hour.