Rick Rosner On, 30: USPS Election Mail, Golf Lip-Out Physics, and Basketball Math
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/08/22
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss concerns about U.S. Postal Service reliability ahead of the midterm elections, drawing comparisons with disruptions during 2020. Rosner then shifts to the physics of golf lip-outs, explaining speed, spin, centripetal acceleration, rim interactions, and rare hole lip-outs. He also examines basketball geometry, comparing NBA and WNBA ball diameters with the standard 18-inch hoop and considering what those measurements reveal about the mathematics of sporting outcomes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With the midterm elections approaching, what are you noticing about the reliability of the mail? Also, what have you been thinking about regarding mathematics and physics hidden in everyday events?
Rick Rosner: 72 days until the midterms. In 2020, with Trump as president and Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, plus COVID, the mail got bad, right? Trump was publicly hostile to expanded voting by mail, and there was a huge political fight over the Postal Service.
I got a lot of packages that had the shit beaten out of them, packages that went missing, had to be traced. A couple of packages had shit stolen from them, as they brought in temporary staff to replace shortages caused by COVID. The Postal Service, even though I love it, got sucky in 2020. There really were major service problems. COVID-related employee shortages, increased package volume, and operational changes at USPS all contributed to delays.
Now Trump’s president again, there’s another election, and the current postmaster general is David Steiner, whom the Postal Service’s Board of Governors selected in 2025. His appointment was controversial partly because he had been a FedEx board member. I received a package today that had the shit beaten out of it, crushed, possibly something crushed, torn open, maybe something missing from the package. It’s a Lego wall art piece, and according to the photos, it was supposed to include the instructions. The instructions aren’t there.
I have to write the seller to see if someone stole them from the box or if they fell out. My mail experience is shitty right now. If you’re voting by mail, vote early.
Maybe drop your ballot at a polling place or in an official drop box if that’s available where you live. I wouldn’t infer from one damaged package that election mail is generally unreliable, though. In fact, despite the broader Postal Service problems in 2020, USPS handled election mail considerably better than ordinary mail and reported very high rates of timely ballot delivery. Then he wanted something mathy.
I watch a little golf, which is embarrassing because it’s such a white boomer thing to do, but I’ll have it on in the background, or maybe even watch it openly if it’s interesting enough, which is lame. I had the BMW Championship on. Scottie Scheffler, currently the number one ranked golfer in the world, had a bad opening round Thursday, shooting a 72, before rebounding with a 65 on Friday. He has also had some nasty lip-outs recently. A lip-out is where the ball reaches the edge of the hole, rolls partly around the rim, and comes back out instead of dropping.
I looked into the physics, which isn’t that tough at a basic level, although the full mechanics get complicated. Whether the ball drops depends on things like its speed, how far its trajectory is offset from the centre of the hole, its spin, and how it interacts with the rim.
If you hit the hole nearly dead on and at a sufficiently low speed, the ball is likely to drop. But if you hit the edge of the hole fast enough, it may roll around the rim and come back out. The ball is being continually redirected as it follows the curved rim. Its centripetal acceleration points inward, toward the centre of that curved path, not outward. In a rotating frame, you can describe an apparent centrifugal effect pointing outward. Physically, the contact forces from the rim provide the inward acceleration needed to curve the ball’s trajectory.
The geometry of the hole and the ball, along with gravity, speed, spin, and the contact forces at the rim, determine whether the ball falls in or rolls back onto the green. Sometimes a ball can travel more than 180 degrees around the hole before coming back out. You can even get something approaching or exceeding a complete circuit, although “full bagel” appears to be informal terminology rather than a standard scientific term.
Scheffler has had putts do more than a half-circle before coming back out of the hole, which looks curious and perverse. The paper I read said that, in rare circumstances, you can even have the ball’s centre of mass descend below the level of the green and have the ball come back out without touching the bottom of the hole.
The research discusses two types. There’s a rim lip-out, where the centre of mass of the golf ball never drops below the level of the green, and a hole lip-out, where it does. In the hole lip-out, spin can allow the ball to descend into the cup, roll along the wall in a pendulum-like motion, and then climb back toward the rim. Potential energy, translational motion, and rotational motion exchange during the process. Under a narrow set of initial conditions, and provided the ball doesn’t hit the bottom, it can come back onto the green.
So you don’t need the simple picture of a ball smashing into the opposite wall and bouncing back out. The more interesting case is a rolling ball interacting with the hole’s cylindrical wall while carrying the right spin. The mechanics themselves can bring it back upward.
I bet most people have never seen a really deep hole lip-out. I don’t watch much golf, but the conditions required are pretty restrictive. A bunch of physics makes this stuff look perverse.
Ball spin in basketball and in golf looks just a little perverse. But when you think about it and look at it a little, it doesn’t have the full perversity of a gyroscope. It all makes sense.
It’s just weird to see. That was a mathy thing without much math at all. Let’s hear some more.
Here’s more additional math, basketball math. A basketball hoop is 18 inches in diameter. The size of an NBA ball is about 9.4 to 9.5 inches in diameter, based on its regulation circumference of 29.5 inches.
So you can’t quite fit two NBA basketballs side by side through a standard rim. However, the WNBA uses a smaller ball, with a regulation circumference of 28.5 inches, or about 9.1 inches in diameter. The smaller ball is intended in part to accommodate differences in average hand size.
So those balls are slightly more than nine inches across. Even two WNBA basketballs would be a little too wide to pass side by side through an 18-inch hoop without deformation. You’d probably never notice the difference between the NBA and WNBA balls unless you were told because the difference in diameter is only a few percent. It’s not that noticeable unless you watch a shitload of basketball.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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