Cricket musings from watching Sri Lanka play England

So I pretty much wasted the entire Saturday morning watching the third day of the Test match between England and Sri Lanka. These Test matches are the classic international form of the game, lasting five days, with each side getting two innings. It is more leisurely than the more recent innovations in which each side bats just once for a limited number of overs (50 for a one-day game and 20 for the three-hour version) and where a decision is guaranteed. (For those who have no idea what cricket is about, please see the primer that I wrote back in 2006.)
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Throwing sodium into a pond

I don’t recall much of my high school chemistry classes back in Sri Lanka. Our teacher was a nice old man who enjoyed telling us the history of chemistry and stories about the chemists of long ago rather than about modern chemistry. But he was a believer in experimentation and demonstrations and one that I remember was when he would cut a small piece of solid sodium and drop it into a beaker. It was fun to see the piece foaming and rushing around the container.
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Brace yourself for the “Who lost Iraq?” debate

The extraordinary developments in Iraq where the group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), considered to be too extreme even by al Qaeda, is sweeping down from the northwestern part of Iraq, capturing two major cities Mosul and Tikrit and threatening to move on Baghdad, has taken people by surprise, mainly because the US-trained Iraqi military seems to have not put up a fight. We now have the spectacle of Iran sending in troops to shore up the government that the US set up, with the possibility of the US providing aerial support, a bizarre alliance indeed.
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Soylent? Really?

There is a new food product that supposedly provides you with all the necessary nutrition in liquid form so that you don’t have to waste time shopping for food, cooking, cleaning etc. In a move that I must admit is marketing genius, the 25-year old inventor and CEO of the company has called its product Soylent, which was certain to attract attention from those who recall the classic 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, even if the implications from that film are disturbing.
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Coca-Cola loses POM case

Recall the case that I wrote about in April in which Coca-Cola was being sued by a pomegranate juice maker POM Wonderful because it was prominently advertising a drink as ‘pomegranate blueberry’ when it contained only 0.5% of those ingredients, the rest being apple and grape juice. This subterfuge enabled it to sell its product for a mere fraction of the cost of its competitor that consisted of only those juices.
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Atheists who yearn for god

There seems to be a whole class of people who like to call themselves atheists but seem to go out of their way to praise the virtues of belief. Francis Schaeffer rose to prominence as one of the creators of the Christian right as a powerful political fore. His son Frank Schaeffer was once a vigorous member of that movement but then became disillusioned and moved away from evangelical Christianity to join the Orthodox church.
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Shocking does not mean significant

The media has been all agog about the defeat of Eric Cantor in his primary race and drawing all manner of sweeping conclusions. Is the Tea Party coming back to life after everyone declared it dead? Does this signal the end of any attempt at immigration reform? Does this mean that any Republican who deviates even the slightest from unwavering opposition to anything that president Obama and the Democratic party propose is now likely to be defeated?
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Honest trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street

I recently panned the film The Wolf of Wall Street. The people who produce the funny Honest Trailers series have created something that gives a much better view of that film than the trailers produced by the film’s producers. These parody trailers are funnier when you have seen the film. They are funny even if you thought the film was good but are funnier if you thought it was terrible.
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