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A parking-buffered bike lane in Vancouver

A friend — I’ll call her Florence — would have represented her country in the 1956 Olympics were it not for the psycho-physical phenomenon known as optical flow.

As the story goes, Florence placed out of the money in a qualifier of the women’s 100-yard dash on the day of the race. However, a photo in the next day’s newspaper clearly showed her breaking the tape ahead of the field. Flo beat out the competition but lost to kinematics: The finish line judge had his eyes fixed on the far outside lane — he did not see Flo blur right past him on the inside.