First things first, before I present to you a short but significant scientific paper. You can now find some photos from Tuesday's archery filming on the BBC Sport Flickr page (which you should visit often, hitting 'refresh' many times on each occasion). The shot of an arrow piercing a watermelon is the star of the show, although you should also see what an amazing day it was outside - despite being bitterly, bitterly cold.

Right then. Time to blind you with some science, for I have discovered an entirely new scientific principle that I like to call the Williams Loop of Futility. Here it is:

We'll get to the minutiae of how this loop is produced very shortly. The Williams Loop of Futility serves to embody what, precisely, it means to be a member of the barnstormingly fallible, transient, intransigent species that is the human race.

Let us pick on a specific and perhaps representative example of the breed, a man who, on a Sunday evening, must drive his car from his home near Oxford to another house in the town of Yateley. It is a fifty minute drive from door to door on a good day. Today is a good day.

The following morning, our man must make his way from this latter house to his place of work in London. However, he cannot take the car with him. He must either drive the car all the way back to a car park near his home in Oxford, then take a coach all the way back down the same motorway again and into London; or leave the car at the house in Yateley and travel in by train, returning for his car later on.

Our man chooses the second option and takes the train on the Monday morning. However, to complicate matters, he is then driven to Shropshire in another car, where he stays overnight. He leaves Shropshire in the same car at 5pm the following day.

He must now collect his car and return to the original house to sleep. But how?

Well, we watch as, at 7.45pm, he is dropped off at a park and ride near Oxford - just ten miles from his house. However, the car has yet to be retrieved.

With no money about his person, he uses his Oxford Tube bus pass to cadge a lift on a returning coach into the centre of town, and walks to the train station, where he buys a ticket for the slightly delayed 8.15pm service to Bournemouth, calling at Basingstoke.

The train arrives at Oxford fifteen minutes late, and reaches Basingstoke station by 9.22pm. Spotting his connecting train waiting at an adjacent platform, our human guinea pig pegs it through the underpass like a man possessed, throws himself onto the train as the doors close, and finds himself fifteen minutes later on the platform at Fleet station.

Having by now found a cashpoint he lobs a ten pound note into the hand of a taxi driver and is soon reunited with his car, with the time standing at just gone 10pm. A short while later, with the car de-iced and its driver refuelled on a little pasta inside the house, the final leg of the journey - a three-motorway trek back towards Oxford - may be completed.

And, as car and driver arrive just ten miles away from their starting point at 11.20pm, taking over three and a half hours to replicate what is normally a fifteen minute drive, the Williams Loop of Futility is complete:

Let the Williams Loop of Futility stand as testament to the only species on Earth that could conjure up such an insanely complicated method of going ten miles down the road back to its resting place. Never again. Never again. (Until this Sunday.)