Daily Archives: January 21, 2021

If you saw the first episode of David Attenboroughs new BBC series Perfect Planet, you will have seen the astounding bloodsucking behaviour of the vampire finches. These small birds exist only on two remote islands in the Galapagos and have evolved to drink the blood of much larger seabirds.

You will also have seen the curious behaviour of the booby, the seabird that the finch was gulping blood from it didnt seem bothered, and it didnt try to get rid of the finch. So how might this bloodsucking and relative lack of resistance have evolved?

It likely began with a process called mutualism, where both individuals gain from a relationship. Cleaner fish such as the cleaner wrasse, for example, set up a cleaning station, typically in coral reefs. Larger fish, octopus or turtles visit the cleaning station to get the smaller fish to remove any dead skin, infected tissue or external parasites.

The relationship between a cleaner wrasse and their client is beneficial to the client as it gets cleaned, helping it to stay healthy. But the cleaner wrasse also benefits as they can eat the parasites and wont themselves be eaten by the client a winning situation all round.

Nevertheless, the evolutionary relationship can turn sour. What if the cleaner wrasse wasnt so careful, and accidentally bit the client? Suddenly, the cleaner benefits from a meal of nutritious flesh. This individual will have acquired more nutrients than usual, giving it an advantage (no matter how small) over all other cleaner wrasse.

The advantage allows it to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on its genes to the next generation. If this clumsy cleaning is heritable, rather than the more careful behaviour, the offspring will also possess the clumsy gene that results in flesh-eating. Over time, all individuals of the species will eat flesh, as it is more beneficial than leaving it the process of evolution via natural selection.

Perhaps something like this happened with the bluestriped fangblenny, a mimic that looks identical to juvenile bluestreak cleaner wrasse. The larger client fish assumes that the blenny provides a cleaning service, so waits patiently to be cleaned, allowing the blenny to avoid predation. But the blenny doesnt ever clean the client instead it bites a chunk out of the larger fish.

The blenny has even evolved an opioid-based venom that numbs the pain of the client long enough for it to escape. As you can see, this is hardly a mutualistic relationship the blenny is the clear winner at the cleaning station as it has gained a nutritious meal, while the client now has an injury as well as its parasites.

There are many parasitic species in the natural world, from animals such as cuckoos that deceive other species into raising their young, to bee orchids that deceive insects into pollinating them. However, what we might be seeing is the result of a longstanding co-evolutionary arms race, where species evolve in response to another.

In the broad example of terrestrial predators and prey, imagine a scenario thousands of years ago where all species ran at the same speed there would be no advantage to either predators or prey. Yet, if the prey gradually evolved hooves, their feet would create less friction with the ground, enabling the prey to run faster than the predators.

The predators would be losing the battle until they evolved a response perhaps having non-retractable claws to maximise traction, as the cheetah does, allowing them to be in the lead in the evolutionary race. These co-evolutionary relationships can continue, and can even change tack, so instead of evolving to achieve an even faster speed, the prey could evolve to jump like springbok antelopes to confuse the predators with evasive manoeuvres.

In fact, the Red Queen hypothesis states that species need to evolve constantly, not to win, but merely to stay alive. The hypothesis comes from Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, where the Red Queen explains looking-glass land to Alice:

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Interestingly, oxpecker birds found in African savannahs feed in a similar way to the vampire finches. They remove parasites from large mammals such as giraffe or rhino, but they also feed on ear wax and blood, preventing wounds from healing by pecking at scabs. This seems like a standard parasitic relationship, where the oxpeckers have the advantage.

But, like the vampire finches, the oxpeckers arent actively removed by the mammals. In fact, they provide an additional benefit they act as lookouts for predators. If the oxpeckers see a predator approaching, they warn their mammal host who can respond accordingly.

The relationship between the vampire finch and booby may well have been a mutualistic relationship that has evolved into a parasitic one. Is this the start of an evolutionary battle between the two species? Or perhaps, like the oxpecker, there is more to this relationship that we have yet to discover.

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Parasites: what causes some species to evolve to exploit others - The Conversation UK

Are supercomputers computers? No, not really. The essence of supercomputers is that they are not computers at all.They are scientific instruments of discovery- or strategic business facilities - they justhappen to be made from computer technology. Lots of it.

Formally the domain of scientific research and defense, supercomputers are finding relevance in commercial operations.

Here are some examples: seismic processing in the oil industry is an application where High Performance Computing (HPC) prevails since most of the computation is of an explicit nature and done on structured grids. Similarly, both electro-magnetics applications using methods of moments algorithms, and signal processing applications account for the use of HPC in the aerospace community - for example, making the 787 lighter.

But broader applications can be found in engineering, product design, complex supply chain optimization (actually, almost any kind of optimization), Bitcoin mining (which you could do on a PC, but has gotten very complex). World's largest glass company, AGC, runs a constant stream of simulations that rely on simulation-driven product development, For the City of Chicago: "The Array of Things Project," 5000 sensors on lampposts can't get the data to the data center for real-time modeling, so they built sensors that do computation and act as a distributed supercomputer. Expect to see many more implementations like these of "Things." Via the supercomputer atLawrence Livermore Laboratory, researchers found that trucks should wear skirts. At Trek Bicycle, bicycles are streamlined from every angle, in draft situations using time-shared HPC.

In a gradual move from supercomputers locked away doing math, the newest ones have theflexibility to handle AI, Analytics, and other general HPC workloads for Big Data, Data Science, Convergence. Innovation. Visualization, Simulation, and Modeling.

HPE announced a program recently called GreenLake, which I'll cover in a future article. I'm intrigued by their use of the term HPC. HPE, since its acquisition of Cray, Inc., in 2019, became the top dog in the highest end of supercomputing, code-named exascale. Exascale means the ability to produce one or multiples of a quintillion double-precision floating-point calculations per second (an exaFLOP). These machines, Aurora (1 exaFLOP, 2021), Frontier (1.5 exaFLOP, 2021), and El Capitan (2 exaFLOP, 2023), are being assembled now.

Keep in mind that the monsters' price tag is >$500 million, and that doesn't include the cost of the facilities to house them, the massive cooling systems, and the 30-40MW power supply (and bill). This is one reason why you can't install one just anywhere. They need a trunk line with enough power to run a small city. Expect next-generation supercomputers to drastically reduce the energy and cooling requirements over the next ten years.

An quote so often repeated that can't be attributed is: "An exaFLOP is one quintillion (1018) double-precision floating-point operations per second or 1,000 petaFLOP. To match what a one exaFLOP computer system can do in just one second, you'd have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years."

They were all slated to replace the two current speedsters; the IBM machines Summit (200petaFLOP, 2018) and Sierra (125 petaFLOP, 2018). So until the HPE/Cray machines come online, Summit and Sierra are still tops. Or so we thought.

Fujitsu surprised everyone in 2020 with the Fugaku machine, operating at a surprising ~475 petaFLOP to take the #1 spot. But rumors are that's just the beginning for Fugaku because they designed everything from the ground up - chips, interconnect, and even software. Then HPE/Cray announced they would bring a 500 petaFLOP computer to Finland in 2021. That will theoretically place it at #1 unless Aurora or Frontier become operational first.

The TOP500lists the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world. Five hundred. Not a typo. My alma mater, for supercomputing, Sandia National Labs, actually has the 486th slowest one (they have others), but just to make a list, it has to perform >2 petaFLOPS. Just to put that in perspective, the 486th slowest supercomputer in the world can do in one second, what you'd have to perform one calculation every second for a mere 63,377,530 years! When I worked on ASCI Red's design in 1997, we brought the first teraFLOP computer up. That would make it one million times slower than the exascale computers coming up.

It's amazing that one man invented the supercomputer. Seymour Cray formed Cray Research in 1972 and produced the Cray-1 supercomputer. It was the world's fastest supercomputer from 1976 to 1982. It measured 8 feet wide by 6 feet high and contained 60 miles of wires. It was pretty, too. By comparison, today's exascale monsters take up the space of two football fields and run a few billion times faster.

The first customer was the Los Alamos National Lab. In 1993, Cray produced its first massively parallel computing supercomputer, the T3D. Supercomputers took off when they switched to, effectively, large arrays of identical servers spurred on by multi-core chips.

So, in a way, all computers are supercomputers now.

Sadly, Cray died in an automobile accident in 1996, and the company was sold to Silicon Graphics, which later merged with Tera Computer Company in 2000. That same year, Tera re-named itself Cray, Inc. In a brilliant move (in my opinion, though not the analysts at the time), HPE acquired Cay, Inc. HPE incorporated Cray technology to release the HPE Cray EX Shasta supercomputer built for the exascale era workloads, a smooth merger of technologies. It can support converged workloads, eliminates the distinction between supercomputers and clusters, combining HPC and AI workloads.

Central to its design is the Slingshot interconnect backbone. The U.S.'s first three exascale supercomputers are all Shasta systems. At the moment, the HPE/Cray is on track to provide three (or more) of the four fastest supercomputers in the world (Actually, Frontier was a Cray project before HPE acquired Cray, but they have blended their technology smoothly). Next time, I'll detail GreenLake and how HPE is offering HPC capabilities to all organizations' sizes.

One question is: do they process data differently than a commercial MPP arrangement?

The one enduring constant is that using an HPC machine requires the programmer to think very differently about how their problem should be attacked. Today's supercomputers are, at a certain level, the same as MPP clusters that commercial databases like Oracle, Teradata, Vertica, IBM, etc., consist of. Both employ an MPP "shared nothing" setup, where each server is independent except for a networking system. Each server is composed of its own processors, memory, and, sometimes, storage, as well as a copy of the operating system. Where they differ is that the supercomputers in production today are dramatically larger. IBM's Sierra: combines commercial CPUs and Nvidia GPU's in 4,320 nodes, with total cores pf 190,080 and 256Gb/CPU memory + 64GB memory per GPU. Commercial database installations are a fraction of its size.

Commercial MPP can't process 2.56 quadrillion double-precision floating-point calculations per second on a Dell chassis with at most 3000 cores. But the real difference is in what they do. An MPP database may handle hundreds or thousands of queries per minute and do optimization, load balancing, and workload management. The queries posed are themselves simple compared to modeling climate change. A supercomputer cannot handle that kind of concurrency when each program may involve billions of calculations.

Currently, programming supercomputers is mostly done in Fortran, C, or C++. As opposed to operational, transactional, and analytical programs, these "codes," as they call them, simple in comparison, but the configuration is the tricky part.

Except for "air-gapped" installations, where the entire arrangement is disconnected from the outside world, most supercomputers are "shared" but not at all like cloud sharing. Hundreds of users around the world may use a supercomputer, but they're not interactive. Programs are run as jobs and are submitted to a queue as part of a specific grant funded by research organizations. Grants are in the order of thousands or millions of CPU hours. They are not open to the public. You are charged per CPU hour, times the queue cost (determined by queue specs and priority). If you have an 11 CPU program running 1 hour, you consume eleven service units multiplied by the queue cost).

Cloud providers support many architectures, so it is conceivable that cloud providers can provide HPC and actual supercomputer time. Advantages of the cloud are pay-by-the-sip, distributed, and multi-tenant. I'll be looking for clarification from HPE for the next article. For now, as I understand it, petascale and exascale supercomputing is not part of GreenLake at the moment and the program is broader than just HPC.

See the rest here:

How supercomputers found their industry mojo - the evolution of high performance computing - Diginomica

Heineken, the proudly Netherlands-based international beer brand, has been brewed for over 150 years. But despite the brands longstanding popularity it is continuously cited as one of the most popular beers in the world Heineken has made sure to keep things fresh in the brewhouse and on the bottle, often changing its logo to keep up with the times.

Like many legacy beer brands, Heinekens logo has gone through a few different phases. The brand kept its signature oval-shaped design for over 100 years starting in 1884, until it simplified to its more minimalistic, modern typography-only look in 1991. Green has been the primary color of all of Heinekens logos except for a brief stint in the 1930s through 1950s, when the brand introduced a red and white logo.

In addition, all of Heinekens logos before 1991 include the brands hometown of Rotterdam, Holland though many fans still mistakenly believe that the brand is based in Germany.

See Heinekens logo evolution over time in VinePairs infographic below.

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The Logo Evolution of Heineken Over Time [Infographic] - VinePair

A winter tree battered by the the winds.

About 95% of insect species worldwide can fly. The question of what environmental pressures determine whether or not an insect species evolves to have wings has long fascinated scientists. The first scientist known to be intrigued was the twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin when, in January of 1831, he visited the Portuguese-held island of Madeira off the coast of Morocco.

View from Madeira's third highest volcanic peak.

The island of Madeira is part of a volcanic archipelago. On its dramatically rocky shoreline, northeast trade winds bring in huge ocean swells. Temperatures at sea level in Madeira average in the 50s and 60s (F) in the winter, and are only a little warmer in the summer. In the windswept mountains it can snow. Because of its microclimates and isolation, Madeira is home to a wide array of endemic species like the Madeiran long-toed pigeon with its six-note cooing and the endangered Zinos Petrel, a seabird that lives exclusively at sea and only returns to the island to breed in the mountains. Madeira also has twenty-four species of endemic land mollusks, and it has lots and lots of beetles. Darwin was a beetle afficionado. On Madeira, he collected them, and noticed that they were wingless.

Steel engraving of naturalist Charles Darwin.

Twenty-five years after his trip to Madeira, Darwin mentioned the wingless beetles to his best friend Joseph Hooker, a geographical botanist and an adventurer who, like Darwin, had voyaged to Madeira in his younger years. To Hooker, Darwin hazarded a guess about how the apterous (un-winged) beetles had evolved. Roughly, what he suggested was that Madeira is a small island with strong winds. Any flying insects would probably have gotten blown out to sea, leaving the flightless ones to dominate the gene pool. Hooker responded that he thought Darwins idea to be very pretty. At the same time, he pointed out that he had found wingless beetles in the Sahara Desert, which is nowhere near water.

Joseph Dalton Hooker

And so a friendly argument began. Darwin and Hooker never resolved it, and it has persisted among scientists from 1855, the year of the two scientists discussion, to 2020. Publishing this December in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers from Australias Monash University have finally settled matters. Drawing on a comprehensive database of insect species that was compiled over the last three decades by other researchers, they have demonstrated that Darwin was right at least in identifying wind as the cause of the evolutionary change.

The data used by the Monash University team had been culled by researchers working in Antarctica but also on twenty-eight Southern Ocean Islands, which are in the expanse of ocean surrounding Antarctica and were the focus of the Monash University study. According to study co-author Rachel I. Leihy, the group of islands is impressive for its geographic and geological diversity. They are in the Southern Pacific, Southern Indian, and Southern Atlantic oceans, and in some cases they are isolated by thousands of kilometers of ocean. Some are relatively new, volcanic formations. Others are fragments of continents.

To varying degrees, they are windy. According to the U. S. National Ocean Service, during the Age of Sail (the 15th to 19th centuries) the winds in the seas surrounding Antarctica propelled tall ships across the ocean at breakneck speed. Amazed sailors named the winds after the latitude lines near the southern tip of the world, and told tales of wild rides courtesy of the roaring forties, furious fifties, and screaming sixties.

To the insect databases collected over three decades by other researchers, Leihy and collaborator Steven L. Chown added data about flight for each species. They also applied to each species every credible hypothesis since Darwins time about the evolution of flightlessness. These theories included:

Dunes formed by wind in the Sahara Desert, Ouargla. Algeria.

Wind, freezing temperatures, or low air pressure might independently increase the energy required to fly, depriving insects of the energetic resources necessary to create or sustain fecundity. Only insects that opt not to fly in difficult environments might retain the ability to reproduce well.

Habitat fragmentation might deprive insects of the motivation to fly.

The disappearance of either predators or competitors from certain environments might make flying unnecessary.

Wind might blow flying insects off the island (Darwins idea).

And a few more.

Ultimately, Leihy and Chown found that nearly half (47%) of insect species that evolved on the Southern Ocean Islands are unable to fly, though some do retain small, remnant wings. According to Leihy, 47% is an exceptionally large number, representing nearly ten times the worldwide incidence of flightlessness among insect species.

Comparing multiple variables about environment with their identification of species that are flightless, the researchers found that wind speed, habitat stability, and summer land surface temperatures correlate with 77% of the Southern Ocean Islands species that have lost the ability fly. (The complete variable list also included seasonality, island area, island age, insectivore richness, and island isolation.)

A traditional tall ship with reefed sails sailing through rough seas in the southern pacific ocean.

Ultimately, Leihy and Chown recognized wind speed as the single strongest environmental contributor to the evolution of flightlessness in insects. Indeed, they noted in their paper that the windier the island, the more flightless insect species they identified.

While Darwin appears to have been right in identifying wind as the primary driver of the evolution of flightlessness among insects, Leihy and Chowns study found that he was probably not correct in pinpointing precisely what it was about the wind that steered the evolutionary path. Darwin had suggested to Hooker that the wind tossed insects off of islands, but Leihy and Chown found that the proportion of flightless insects on an island doesnt generally scale with island size. This would mean that insect populations are not decimated and their gene pools fundamentally changed because the bugs that fly get blown out to sea.

The researchers did suggest an alternate way in which wind might drive the evolution of flightlessness. In environments that are very windy (like Madeira, the Sahara Desert, and the islands near the southern tip of the world), the energetic cost of flying may be far too high. Darwin had specified that all organisms are driven by a biological imperative to ensure the survival of their particular genome into subsequent generations. If he was right, insects are better off investing energetically in the machinery of reproduction than they are trying to fly in impossible environments.

Indeed, according to Leihy, Other researchers have looked at insect fecundity. Theyve found that species that are flightless have a higher reproductive output.

Case closed, probably. Score one point (not two) for Darwin.

Go here to see the original:

Wind Creates Evolutionary Changes In Flying Insects, Depriving Them Of Their Wings - Forbes

Spoiler warning: The article contains plot spoilers for Promising Young Woman.

Emerald Fennells directorial feature debut quickly shifted from one of last years most anticipated to one of the most polarizing upon release. The division stems mostly from the shocking third act and the vastly different reads on the film.Promising Young Womancan be viewed as a psychological thriller, a scathing satire, or even a dark drama with thriller elements depending on experiences or perspective. That Fennell weaponizes rom-com tropes in her social analysis further blurs the genre lines.Promising Young Womanis a rape-revenge film that doesnt even depict or use the word rape, and even its implementation of revenge could be questioned. Its another entry in a growing trend of rape-revenge films that venture outside of horror to deliver a provocative critique of modern rape culture.

Promising Young Womanopens to three colleagues blowing off steam at a bustling bar after work hours. They notice a woman sitting alone, too intoxicated to sit upright. One of the men (Adam Brody) decides to approach while his pals whoop and cheer. He asks the woman, Cassie (Carey Mulligan), if she has a means of getting home safely, then gently pushes her into allowing him to help. Once in the rideshare, however, he reroutes the driver to his place and proceeds to ply Cassie with alcohol. He coaxes her into his bed, all while she slurs protests. Cassie drops her drunk faade and catches him off guard. This opening sequence highlights Cassies unusual hobby of systematically dismantling the system one Nice Guy at a time.

Throughout the film, Cassies lingering trauma reveals itself. Once a promising young woman in med school, Cassie dropped out to take care of her life-long best friend, Nina, after a college party resulted in an assault from which she never recovered. Shunned from peers and authority figures that chose to preserve the promising young mans future, Nina eventually ended her life. Cassies lingering survivors guilt and trauma meant shes unable to move past it. Cassie lives at home with her parents, spends her days working a coffee shop, and moonlights as a sort of vigilante. Her method is entirely devoid of violence; she seems content to simply hold a mirror up to her would-be rapists.

Promising Young Woman

Cassies vengeance initially lacks a specific aim. She cant even bring herself to look up Ninas assailant. At least, not until former classmate Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham) walks into her coffee shop one afternoon. Its a twisted meet-cute that sparks a romance between the two, offering Cassie a glimmer of hope for a normal life. But Ryan still has ties to the med school social circle, and mentioning Ninas attacker spurns an end game plot for revenge thats catalyzed when a shocking video of that fateful night in college surfaces.

Cassie arrives at the fifth, and final stage of her plan with all hope shattered, the make-or-break divisive moment in the film. For the first time, Cassie threatens to resort to violence, and it ends tragically for her. For many, Cassies demise seems to remove all hope for survivors, but it does present an interesting point in the murky and confusing waters of rape culture. Murder is cut and dry, but theres a general cultural confusion about consent, especially in instances like Ninas, with a system that protects the accused. Theres no catharsis for Cassie, and therefore none for the viewer.

Fennell purposefully induces tonal whiplash in her debut, a metaphor for the emotional and psychological cycle of a trauma survivor. Promising Young Womanshifts from comedy to drama to romance to jarring thrills, covering all spectrums of genre unified by a candy-coated pop music aesthetic. Its not fear that gives Cassie purpose but wrath and heartache. Fear isnt the response the film is trying to induce, either.

Rape-revenge films rose to prominence in the 70s thanks to easing censorship restrictions and a more mainstream cultural discussion of sexual politics. LikeI Spit on Your GraveorLast House on the Left, the exploitation films that emerged during the era were attributed to horror and followed a distinct formula. These movies featured a graphic rape, followed by an equally graphic enactment of revenge by either the victim or an agent acting on their behalf. The explicit, violent, and exploitive nature of rape-revenge films became so synonymous with horror that the attribution has been tough to shake since. Movies dont always fit tidily into textbook definitions of genre, especially not with the emerging trend in rape-revenge films. The topic of sexual assault is broad and complex, and adheres less and less to the simplified two-half structure of rape-revenge horror.

As notable film critic and scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes in the introduction of her bookRape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, Rape-revenge films, then, are fluid and elastic. Despite its common association with the horror film in the United States during the 1970s in particular, it spans genre, times, and national borders. She chronicles cinemas surprising and complicated history with sexual violence in the rape-revenge narrative, and never has the complexity of it been more evident than the present.

Natalia Leites M.F.A.

Much likePromising Young Woman, Natalia Leites M.F.A. follows a traumatized young woman on a quest for revenge while exposing the system that makes it difficult for real justice. Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) is a grad student who eagerly accepts an invite to a party by her college crush. He isolates her there and rapes her. Later, she kills him in a fit of rage, and it sets her down a vigilante path to destroy men like her attacker.M.F.A.is far more firmly rooted in the thriller genre but presents an ambitious peek into the college setting in which these situations can thrive.

Similarly, Coralie FargeatsRevengespends little time on the inciting act. It focuses on an intense, French extremism style action-survival thriller with its leading lady outwitting and outlasting the men who want to snuff out living proof of their heinous crime. Fargeat sought to upend the male gaze and challenge preconceived notions about people similar to her heroine.

Paul VerhoevensEllepresents a morally conflicted cat-and-mouse game between Isabelle Hupperts Michle and her rapist. LikeEllescontemporaries, Michle eschews going to the police due to a bad experience and instead takes matters into her own hands most provocatively and peculiarly. While categorized as a thriller, Verhoeven employs dark humor to detail Michles journey in freeing herself through sex and violence.

Isabelle Huppert in Elle

Recently, ShuddersHuntedrepurposes the Red Riding Hood fairy tale for its rape-revenge adjacent survival thriller, and the upcomingViolation presents a nonlinear take on the rape-revenge formula to convey a raw and aching psychodrama instead. Both are much more rooted in horror yet evoke wrath or tragedy.

The act of sexual violence naturally inspires fear and revulsion, which plays a big part in the rape-revenge films classification. But its because of their increasingly complicated and contradictive approaches that make the rape-revenge films singular attribution to horror not so simple. Its less about the act itself and more about the filmmakers point. Promising Young Woman uses the characteristics of a romantic comedy or sex comedy to shame any viewer that would find humor in the situations Cassie intentionally pursues. Through her avenging angel, Fennell directs rage at those who allow sexual assault to happen just as much as the predators. If not more so. She makes the medicine easier to swallow with a bubblegum pink coating and bursts of levity.

Promising Young Woman is another entry in a growing trend of modern rape-revenge films that have departed horror in favor of weaponizing other genre tropes to support their core themes. While Fennells debut continues to inspire debate over its messaging, it succeeds in demonstrating that a rape-revenge film doesnt have to belong to horror to elicit a lingering, visceral response.

Matilda Lutz in Revenge

Excerpt from:

'Promising Young Woman' and the Evolution of Rape-Revenge Films - Bloody Disgusting

From his tour debut in 1998 to playing at the 2020 Australian Open, Roger Federers single-handed backhand has evolved. It is a shot that has varied with his mental state and physical capabilities. It also impacted how he played the game as a whole.

Here, I explore Federer's various backhands at different stages of his career and how this altered match tactics. In turn, this may give us clues as to how Federer can best approach his game for 2021 as we look forward to the new season.

From 1998 to 2004, Federer hit an aggressive backhand with little topspin. Young and free from inhibition, he had the conviction to take the ball early, driving with a high finish above the head. He pushed against his non-dominant shoulder, spreading both arms behind him, minimally turning his chest towards the court.

The result was a flat and hard shot that was used to finish points quickly. Soon after the rally started, Federer would suddenly hit down the line for a winner or draw an error, as shown in his 2002 Hamburg title run. The conviction on the backhand side offered remarkable shot tolerance and enabled him to make half-volleys from the baseline to stay in the point.

Looking at the 2004 US Open, it is clear that Federer was transitioning to a backhand with greater topspin, rotating his chest towards the court as he hit. Keen to use the backhand more as a rally ball, Federer would wait until he could dictate with the more powerful forehand.

Often he would establish a backhand exchange, only to then move around for a penetrating inside-out forehand. The backhand was still used to actively hit winners but more so when Federer had plenty of space to play with where speed wasnt necessary. Federer would serve out-wide on the deuce side then calmly place a backhand into the open court, as used in the 2007 Australian Open semi-finals against Andy Roddick.

After the 2008 Wimbledon Final loss, Federers topspin backhand relied increasingly on his mental state. Overall, he hit the shot with less conviction, depending heavily on his shoulders' rotation and the hitting arm for power compared with his legs.

In drawn-out rallies, Federer would abandon the groundstroke and default to the backhand slice. While this had always been used for tactical variation, the backhand side now played a slightly less offensive role than before.

The groundstroke still produced winners, and there were patches like the 2014 Shanghai Masters where Federer was mentally prepared to be consistently aggressive with it. But in the main, the backhand had become a smaller force in point-construction.

After a six-month break from surgery, Federer rejoined the tour physically refreshed and mentally free without the weight of expectation. Federer worked with his coach Ivan Lubii on a flatter, hard, and early backhand in the interim. He returned to his initial technique, spreading both arms behind him, rising on his right leg loaded with power.

The neo-backhand is widely credited as having won Federer the 2017 Australian Open as he was able to keep points short, hitting winners off the return of serve and creating sharp angles early in rallies. Most importantly, Federer could neutralise Nadals forehand in the final with such a powerful and flat shot. The backhand helped gain him further titles, including that years Wimbledon and the 2018 Australian Open.

Federer has not used the backhand to attack as much in recent years, opting for a gentler topspin shot instead. In the 2019 Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic, Federer did use the backhand confidently for winners. But in the last set, perhaps feeling tense, he increasingly went to the more defensive slice.

The neo-backhand did, however, make a brief appearance earlier at the 2019 Miami Open. Certainly, this is the most potent version of Federers backhands, and returning to such a shot would significantly boost his chances for 2021. The prolonged break after surgery last year may well afford him that opportunity.

Read more from the original source:

The Evolution of Roger Federer's Backhand - Perfect Tennis

Pep Guardiola celebrates his 50th birthday on Monday, and fairly seismic things tend to happen on milestones like this.

When he turned 20 he established himself in the Barcelona first team, when he was 30 he left the Nou Camp, and when he was 40 he won the Champions League with his boyhood club at Wembley.

Since then he has spread his footballing message around the world, and recently revealed he is ready to stay in the dugout for longer than he had ever intended.

To work out what could possibly come next, we need to realise what has come before.

This is the story of Guardiola at 20, 30, 40 and 50, with a little guesswork on the future and what he might be doing at 60 too

That winning personality, the character to organise things, he had that since he was little, Albert Benaiges tells The Athletic.

Hes changed because hes grown as a person, as a coach, like everybody, but in certain...

Read more:

Pep Guardiola: An evolution through Barcelona, Bayern and City - The Athletic