Brilliant catch in World Cup

The West Indies came close to causing an upset by beating Australia today. Australia batted first and West Indies had them on the ropes before allowing them to recover. Set a target of 289 to win, West Indies fell just short, disappointing many in the cricket world who tend to cheer against Australia partly for being part of the cartel with India and England and partly because Australia practices a vicious form of gamesmanship that extends to even cheating, taking the view that it’s ok as long as you are not caught.
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TV review: Unforgotten

I have watched all three seasons of this British police procedural TV series. Each season has a self-contained story and consists of six episodes spread over 4.5 hours and is one of the best of such shows that I have seen. I fancy myself as a connoisseur of such detective shows and like most connoisseurs have strong likes and dislikes. I heartily dislike violence and gore and find action sequences such as chases and fights to be boring. They seem to me to be a cheap way of generating interest to compensate for weak plots and poor writing, acting, and directing. I like shows where the focus is on the process of detection and this show definitely fits the bill.
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The secret life of checked airline baggage

On a recent flight, I had an interesting discussion with the man next to me. It turns out his job is to work with airports and airlines to streamline the process of baggage handling to reduce delays and misplaced bags and he told me how the system works. Apparently, there are miles of conveyor belts behind the scenes at airports that begin at the check-in counter and they have multiple sensors all along the way that use lasers to periodically check the barcode on the baggage tags to make sure that the bag gets transferred to the correct belt for the final destination. The sensors also check the times at each checkpoint and predict when it should reach the next checkpoint so that if a bag does not reach it at the expected time, an alert goes off and someone physically goes to see if the bag has mistakenly switched to the wrong belt, fallen off the belt, or has got jammed somewhere. He said that the goal is to have bags spend no more than 20 minutes in transit from one plane to another though they can often do it in 10 minutes.
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Dark matter anomaly resolved

One of the features of science is that there is always a tension going on. We have standard paradigms that most scientists work within but on occasion a new result will turn up that seems to be violate the boundaries of that paradigm. What does one do then? Reject the paradigm and its associated underlying theory? Seasoned scientists know not to do that because throwing out a paradigm is not something to be undertaken lightly since good theories are hard to come by. What they do is treat the discrepant event as an anomaly meriting further study.
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Afghanistan has disappointing loss to Sri Lanka in cricket World Cup

Sri Lanka beat Afghanistan today in a rain-affected, low-scoring thriller, the third exciting game in a row after a dull start to the tournament. The quality of the cricket on both sides was decidedly less than stellar but Afghanistan was playing better for most of the game until their batting collapsed towards the end. Although Sri Lanka is technically the team I should support, given that I was born in the country and such tribal allegiances tend to determine whom one cheers for, I actually wished that Afghanistan had won. Beating a top ten Test match team for the first time in a World Cup match would have been an enormous boost to that war-torn country’s morale.

Sri Lanka meanwhile has been going through a woeful period, especially in the shorter forms of the game, and a loss to the lowest-ranked Afghanistan team would have been depressing for them but perhaps the shock that the Sri Lankan cricket authorities needed to realize that they had to shake things up in their administration, selection, and coaching. The only bright spot is that their current team captain Dimuth Karunaratne, appointed after a series of rapid-fire changes in the captaincy, is leading by example, batting and fielding well. It now requires his teammates, especially the batters, to step up.

So now we go on to tomorrow’s matches where India plays South Africa and Bangladesh plays New Zealand. Both games should be close. India has to be favored over the talented but underperforming South African team that has already lost twice and is furthered hampered by their ace fast bowler Dale Steyn being ruled out of the rest of the tournament because of a shoulder injury. New Zealand is favored to beat Bangladesh but the latter team has been surging, as seen in their upset win over South Africa.

The dehumanizing effect of the Everest crowds

This year has brought to light the large number of deaths on Mount Everest and the massive overcrowding taking place there. One would think that the danger involved in this climb would result in people who find themselves together on the peak being solicitous of one another and helping those in distress. Instead it seems to have bred a kind of callousness as people become so determined to get to the top that nothing, even the sight of others in obvious distress, will deter them. This article describes what the crowding has done to people.
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