Backstroke

Backstroke is one of the four swimming styles regulated by FINA, and the only regulated style swum on the back. This has the advantage of easy breathing, but the disadvantage of swimmers not being able to see where they are going. It is also the only competition swimming style that has a different start. The swimming style is similar to an upside down front crawl. Both backstroke and front crawl are long-axis strokes. In Individual medley backstroke is the second style swum; in the team medley it is the first style swum.

History

Backstroke is an ancient style of swimming, popularized by Harry Hebner. It was the second stroke to be swum in competitions after the front crawl. The first Olympic backstroke competition was the 1900 Paris Olympics men's 200 metre.

Technique

In the initial position, the swimmer performing backstroke lies flat on the back; arms stretched with extended fingertips, and legs extended backwards.

Arm movement

In backstroke, the arms contribute most of the forward movement. The arm stroke consists of two main parts: the power phase (consisting of three separate parts) and the recovery. The arms alternate so that always one arm is underwater while the other arm is recovering. One complete arm turn is considered one cycle. From the initial position, one arm sinks slightly under water and turns the palm outward to start the catch phase (first part of the power phase). The hand enters downward (pinkie finger first) then pulling out at a 45 degree angle, catching the water.

Backslash

The backslash (\) is a typographical mark (glyph) used mainly in computing and is the mirror image of the common slash (/). It is sometimes called a hack, whack, escape (from C/UNIX), reverse slash, slosh, backslant, downhill, backwhack, and in rare occasions, bash, reverse slant, and reversed virgule. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+005C \ reverse solidus (HTML \).

History

Bob Bemer introduced the "\" character into ASCII on September 18, 1961, as the result of character frequency studies. In particular the \ was introduced so that the ALGOL boolean operators ∧ (AND) and ∨ (OR) could be composed in ASCII as "/\" and "\/" respectively. Both these operators were included in early versions of the C programming language supplied with Unix V6, Unix V7 and more currently BSD 2.11.

Usage

In many programming languages such as C, Perl, and PHP and in Unix scripting languages, the backslash is an escape character, used to indicate that the character following it should be treated specially (if it would otherwise be treated normally), or normally (if it would otherwise be treated specially). For instance inside a C quoted string the sequence \n produces a newline byte instead of an 'n', and the sequence \" produces an actual double quote rather than the special meaning of the double quote ending the string. In various regular expression languages it is used this way, changing subsequent literal characters into metacharacters and vice versa. Following this usage, the double backslash sequence \\ of course produces a normal literal backslash.

Backstroke (album)

Backstroke is the second LP released by Matthew Dear under his given name. The album was received fairly well by reviewers, but thought to have been released too quickly after his previous album, Leave Luck to Heaven.

Track listing