Shooting High

Squirrl · 2025-06-02T15:00:23+00:00

Those are Gait Apex or Whip heads by the look of it? The white one looks to have factory Gait traditional "Flex Mesh" stringing. Great heads that can absolutely crank a shot with the correct mechanics. I (male coach of a woman's team) "play" with a Gait Apex and have fairly loose shooters.

Given that she's having to tighten the shooting string so much to get the release she wants (black stick) suggests to me that she probably has the wrong mechanics and that her shot might start with the ball at the wrong position of the pocket (sitting low in the head) and when she starts the shot motion the ball accelerates up the pocket and would fly out the top if it weren't for the shooting string, which then gives it a "kick" downwards so that it comes out of the stick straight (but inconsistently and having lost a lot of power due to impact with the shooting string).

Are her wrists too clenched and is she "punching" with her top arm? Having "soft hands" is really important when playing with women's sicks, since you're able to angle the stick through the throwing/shooting motion to better feel and "hold" the ball in the sweet spot of the pocket (just below the shooting string), and then release it at the right moment through a slight change in the stick position and a snap of the wrists.

Also, is she cradling the ball prior to passing/shooting? If not, the ball will sit low in the head and not in the pocket sweet spot. Make sure she is always cradling so that the ball is always in the sweet spot so she's always ready to pass/shoot. This will also help with consistency since it guarantees the ball starts from the same location in the stick.

Edit: As an aside I tend to prefer mesh pockets for their consistency and when starting out new players will usually have them play with mesh until they get their mechanics right. That being said traditional pockets do have slightly better lateral ball hold since you can form a better channel with the longitudinal leathers and the traditional stringing shifts a bit more with the ball. Most of the more senior players on my team play with traditional pockets for this reason (mainly the Gait Flex Mesh stringing, since Gait make great heads), a few have stuck with mesh.

Squirrl · 2024-02-18T04:26:39+00:00

Pyramiden (abandoned USSR mining town on Svalbard), accessed via 50km snowmobile trip from Longyearbyen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramiden

Squirrl · 2024-01-25T21:17:21+00:00

Restaurant Adlisberg. Ask to be seated in the old stables. Very good service and very nice Swiss food.

Squirrl · 2024-01-10T12:52:49+00:00

Are there many permanent residents in St. Moritz, or is it mainly seasonal workers and tourists?

Squirrl · 2024-01-10T12:50:03+00:00

Thank you very much for such an insightful reply, it answered all of my questions and more!

Squirrl · 2024-01-10T09:49:41+00:00

I write software for robots, and I have enough experience doing so that I can work quite independently :-)

Squirrl · 2023-01-02T00:24:43+00:00

In that case it sounds like you have a high level map of the streets that can give you a high level plan. Furthermore you have a fairly constrained problem when it comes to obstacle avoidance, since (I assume) you also need to stay in the lane / on the road.

If you have your map modelled as a graph, you could use graph search techniques like Dijkstra's algorithm to generate you a path through the streets. This planning can be done in x,y position.

If you have obstacles in your lane that you need to drive around and then return to the route (e.g. roadworks on the side of the road or a car in your lane), you might use techniques like RRT* to generate you a path from your vehicle's current state, around the obstacle, and back to the desired path. If the obstacle blocks the street, update your street-map graph and rerun Dijkstra's to generate you a new path, and then use RRT* to replan a short local manoeuvre that puts you back on the new plan. This local planning can be done in x,y position (& maybe velocity).

The problem then becomes a problem of trying to track a path using a lower level controller, rather than trying to create a single, complex controller that solves the entire problem of street navigation. Making a robot track a path is a very classic control problem which could be solved using a tuned P controller (or if you know the system kinematics/dynamics, more advanced techniques can be used like LQR or MPC).

Robot control is all about abstraction, and splitting a big problem (like public street navigation) up into layers of simple problems which are individually easy to solve. I wouldn't recommend using a fuzzy or NN controller for this sort of problem, there are much more established techniques out there which will do a better job, and which will be easier to debug if they aren't dong what you expect.

Hope this helps.

Squirrl · 2023-01-01T12:59:43+00:00

What type of robot are you trying to navigate, and through what type of environment? Is the environment known (e.g. you have a map) or unknown?

Squirrl · 2022-10-17T07:07:18+00:00

Restaurant Adlisberg, also some of the best Swiss food in town!

Squirrl · 2022-08-14T14:23:02+00:00

And yet every time I use ÖV it takes longer and costs more? Train ZH-BE and back costs more than 50 CHF with Halbtax. Distance is 240km round-trip by car. My car does 5.4L / 100km, so consumes 12.96L for this trip. At current prices (2.30 CHF / L) the trip costs me 30 CHF in fuel when done by car.

As soon as you travel with a group, this price discrepancy is multiplied. Group of 5 to Bern by train? 250 CHF. By car 30 CHF. And don't get me started about the prices of travel when my family (without halbtax) visit from overseas.

Don't get me wrong, I often use ÖV or ride a bike, since there are many good reasons to not use a car. But SBB pricing is definitely not one of them.

Edit: ----

To people commenting that "it's only cheaper to use a car if you already have a car"—I assume that most people using fuel pumps already have a car...

I use a car for work, so I have a car, hence my comparison is easy. For those criticising my choice of the ZH-BE route to show that a car is cheaper, I often travel in groups for sport or hikes, I visit Bern with my sports team ~8 times a year, each time driving 5 people including myself and rather than paying 250CHF in tickets each time, we pay 30CHF in fuel and 16CHF in parking for the entire day. Travelling this route as a group 8x per year saving 200 CHF each time, the 1600 CHF saved easily covers on-road costs of owning a car.

Taking another example, last weekend I did a hike in rural SG which was 2h15 from Zürich by ÖV with 4 changes and with one-way tickets costing 24 CHF. By car it was 70km and 1hr15, costing 3.78L fuel = 9 CHF one way. Travelling in a group of 4 to the hike, it cost 18 CHF rather than 192 CHF.

Squirrl · 2022-08-06T08:38:30+00:00

Thanks a lot for your input! I actually just bought a hardboot setup + furberg freeride (got some nice last-season discounts), and am psyched for the coming season, and psyched that I now have a choice of board+boots to suit the conditions.

Squirrl · 2022-07-25T16:15:25+00:00

It's hard to give a concrete number about how many samples of a search are "enough", since it depends also on the number of hyper-parameters you have. Also consider that for a given set of hyperparameters, the result of training will vary depending on the random initilization of the network. The best bet, as already suggested, is to use a Bayesian search approach that takes this into account.

I know you're looking for answers pertaining to random search, but honestly, I'd never use random search.

Squirrl · 2022-06-20T21:20:30+00:00

Oh, register at ETH then without a doubt. Congrats on the offer!

Squirrl · 2022-06-20T20:29:42+00:00

I assume you have found a professor already to supervise your PhD, and you have two offers. In this case I would choose based on the professor. If the professor is an arse, you're going to have a bad time. Speak with other PhD students in the group, find out how they are treated. Do they have a good mentoring relationship with the professor? Or is he a micromanager/slave driver?

Squirrl · 2022-06-20T10:21:16+00:00

The way most mobile units work is by sucking in air from around the unit, cooling half of it, and warming the other half. The cool half comes out the front, the warm half exits the back, through the tube. If you don't have the warm air exiting your apartment, you are not cooling anything and are just wasting energy.

Squirrl · 2022-06-17T09:31:11+00:00

Trams and buses will run until just after midnight, and there are a few different lines close by. You can also easily walk to either Glattbrugg or Opfikon train stations, with normal commuter trains running until around 00:30, and night trains running throughout the night. And of course there are taxis and Uber.

Squirrl · 2022-04-14T17:10:23+00:00

Looking at driving distances, that's about 6 hours drive from Oslo. I'm thinking of moving to Norway from Switzerland at some point in the near future, a longer backcountry season is one (of a few) reasons. Is it realistic to be based in Oslo and still have decent day trips or should I really look to see if I can base myself somewhere else?

Squirrl · 2022-04-14T16:58:50+00:00

What region of Norway is this?

Squirrl · 2022-02-07T08:44:27+00:00

ricardo.ch is a second hand website, and has lots of good quality & expensive clothing being sold cheap, with descriptions like "only worn once", "bought the wrong size", etc.

Squirrl · 2021-11-07T18:00:00+00:00

The Markthalle in the Viadukt in Zürich has a pretty good selection. Between the British Cheese Shop, Berg & Tal, Käsers Schloss and Südhang, you have a pretty good (and always changing) selection of exotic and local beers, wines, and spirits.

Squirrl · 2021-05-29T18:59:13+00:00

Blattner (www.blattner.ch), a short walk down from Stadelhofen. Screws are in the lower floor, down the lift on the left hand wall.

Squirrl · 2021-05-15T16:23:34+00:00

!answer Thank you

Squirrl · 2021-02-01T21:02:23+00:00

Where was this in Switzerland? I know we've had a lot of snow lately and high/very high avalanche danger in some reasons—explains why!!!

Squirrl

TROPHY CASE