2007 July « Martin’s Blog

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Brisbane to Tucson

July 29, 2007 at 5:48 pm | In Uni | Leave a Comment

Brisbane to Taipei: The bloke sitting next to me was on his way to Bali and was really getting on the sauce. I indulged him for a few early morning beers and then spent the rest of the time playing with the personal entertainment system. I quite enjoyed Bridge to Terabithia.

Taipei airport: I had read on the internet that this was the most boring airport in the world. This was not hyperbole. When I disembarked the plane I entered a featureless self repeating corridor that continued further than the eye could see.

After escaping this nightmare I changed 10 dollars Australian for some Taiwanese money and bought myself a sandwich and an odd tasting drink.

Taipei to LA: I slept most of the way.

LA: Stayed at the Best Western hotel – watched some HBO and baseball. I went to Venice beach for a couple of hours the next day. It was like in the movies (street ball, a guy on roller skates playing electric guitar, some guy yelled out “fuck the police”). However I soon remembered that I don’t really enjoy looking at shops or people so went to a cinema and watched The Simpson’s movie.

LA to Tucson: Got the greyhound overnight. A black woman refused to sit at the back of the bus – it took me a little while to realise why. Stopped in Quarzite, Arizona and had Subway at 3:00 in the morning. Saw some desert sunshine as I woke up.

The ‘A’ Team

July 21, 2007 at 12:10 am | In Alphabet teams, Cricket | 2 Comments

On one of the many nights I have spent at trivia with Dave from Pappus’ Plane we whiled away the time before kick-off naming cricket teams with various restrictions.

One idea that we had was to name a team whose players started with each letter of the alphabet. Now that I have my own blog I can just do that kind of stuff here. So here, in the first of many episodes of this feature, is my team of test cricketers whose name (see note 1 for discussion of this criteria) starts with A.

Michael Atherton …………….(115 tests, 7728 runs @ 37.69)
Dennis Amiss …………………..(50 tests, 3612 runs @ 46.30)
Mohinder Armanath ………..(69 tests, 4378 runs @ 42.50)
Mohammad Azharuddin …..(99 tests, 6215 runs @ 45.03)
Jimmy Adams …………………..(54 tests, 3012 runs @ 41.26)
Les Ames (wk) ………………….(47 tests, 2434 runs @ 40.56, 94 dismissals)
Warwick Armstrong (c) …….(50 tests, 2863 runs @ 38.68, 87 wkts @ 33.59)
Abdul Qadir ……………………..(67 tests, 1029 runs @ 15.59, 236 wkts @ 32.80)
Curtly Ambrose ………………..(98 tests, 1439 runs @ 12.40, 405 wkts @ 20.99)
Terry Alderman ………………..(41 tests, 203 runs @ 6.54, 170 wkts @ 27.15)
Neil Adcock ………………………(26 tests, 146 runs @ 5.40, 104 wkts @ 21.10)

NOTES:

I have followed howstat.com in defining what it means to start with A. Basically Pakistani ’surnames’ are either religious or the player’s father’s first name so their alphabetical order is based on their first name instead. This mean, for example, we lose Wasim Akram but gain Abdul Qadir.
Other players you might consider: marvan atapattu, aamir sohail, abdul razzaq, ajit agarkar, asif iqbal, nathan astle, russel arnold.
I’d never heard of Neil Adcock before looking up players for this team but 4 wickets a match at 21 is good enough for me.
We’ll have to see how other letters turn out but this isn’t a bad team. Ames is one of the top four or five keeper/batsman ever. Ambrose and Adcock have pace and bounce, Alderman swing, Abdul has guile and Armstrong will keep it tight. The worry I guess is the batting – no superstars and players like Atherton and Adams didn’t perform consistently throughout their career.

LaTeX test

July 20, 2007 at 10:05 pm | In Mathematics | 5 Comments

This post is to test LaTeX. To do this simply type the dollar sign followed by ‘latex’ then your latex code then another dollar sign. For example, the following paragraph randomly picked out of my honours thesis.

We aim to show that $C/K$ is a principal homogenous space over $E/K$ with cohomology class $\{\xi\}$ .
Firstly we show that for $p,q \in C$ there is a unique $P \in E$ such that $\mu(p,P)=q$ . If $\mu(p,P)=q$ then $\phi^{-1}(\phi(p)+P)=q$ so $P=\phi(q)-\phi(p)$ is uniquely determined.