Friday

Converted the Digital Universe to stereo and told Mark and Brenda about it. Mark will have it ready when he and Randy go to the AAS meeting in San Diego in case the AMNH folks want to use it on the geowall. Also added Brian's additions of the latest 2dF and SDSS surveys, and the exoplanets. Sent a long post telling people about additional features. Brian gave a good response promptly. He's cool :)


Zimbabwe's ranked 151 out of 155 countries in the 2005 Index of Economic Freedom. The only (ranked) countries where the government interferes more with the economy are Libya, Myanmar, and North Korea. What a piece of shit Mugabe is. All of Zimbabwe's a wasteland, and all ZANU PF cadres merely turds.


I didnt realize Estonia was #4 on this list. Wow...

Unsurprisingly, Botswana (Zimbabwe's neighbor) is the highest African country on it, at 37, ahead of Japan and France.

Randy likes the new iron nucleus shower. He suggested we investigate our assumption that all particles in the shower move at the speed of light, since it's pretty clear at an early timestep that the particles have a kinda sphere from the start point.



Had a great discussion with Daisuke about problems with centering his data, what his data meant in spacetime, and finally ended up on pronunciations of Japanese words. That's what you get when a computational linguistics student makes cosmology visualizations.

I suddenly wondered how many cricket teams ever won a match after having to follow on, and Googled (sans quotes) 'winning after follow-on'

And Lo! The Almighty Google had mercy on its faithful client and pointed me promptly to the answer at HowSTAT, a scarily broad site of cricket statistics. Anyway, out of 262 test matches it had on record, 200 were won by the side enforcing the follow-on (unsurprising), 62 were drawn (how many due to unwanted precipation, I wonder) and 3 were won by the side that suffered the follow-on. While such reversal of cricket fortune is rare, I hadnt realized it was *that* rare!



Funnily enough, the side suffering the ignominy of snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory was, in each case, Australia. After their first reversal by the Pommies in 1896 (yeah, eighteen), the next was in 1981, at Headingley (photos). Now I know why the English keep harping on about it! It's not just that they've not had much to celebrate cricketwise since, but also that this is actually something worth harping on about. (Especially if you're a cricket journalist with a pachydermic memory on a slow news day.) Finally, the third instance was twenty years later, when the Aussies were in India (Eden Gardens 2001, to those in the know). A little known piece of fiction resulting from this defeat was that the word Dravidian now has an alternative meaning in Indian English dictionaries, as "one who worships Rahul Dravid".

Went to the geowall show Special Treatment by Applied Interactives in the evening. Interesting, but failed to touch me enough. But it's still a work in progress, so I look forward to seeing it completed.

Oh dear. Helped a dear friend of mine revisit his pain from ages ago, by mentioning a happy memory (us becoming national quiz champs in Zim) from 1994. The wrapper memories weren't that happy. Owww...